


First Meeting: Kas and Angel

by Alex51324



Series: Finding Home--the Dreaded Bonding AU [4]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, M/M, Original Character-centric, Sentinel/Guide Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-25 16:13:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex51324/pseuds/Alex51324
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story shows how Kas and Angel Temas, OC's from the <i>Finding Home</i> trilogy, met and became partners. OC-centric.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Meeting: Kas and Angel

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally posted on Livejournal in February 2011, and is reposted here by readers' request.
> 
> Warnings: Angel is a total woobie, and this story deals with his Tragic Woobie Backstory, which includes allusions to abuse and suicide. It's all fairly mild by the standards of a tragic woobie backstory fic, but it's there.

The first time Kas Dillinger saw Angel Temas, he was sitting on the ground crying. The rest of the basic training platoon was cranking out pushups while the drill sergeant counted. Walking up and down the line, the Sergeant paused to yell at one recruit to keep his back straight, but he walked past the Sentinel, who was curled up with his knees to his chest, without saying a word about it. 

This was…not at all what Kas had been expecting. Being a new Sentinel’s first Guide was always a nightmare; being assigned to a Sentinel still in Basic wasn’t anything he’d ever heard of happening before, but he could only speculate that it would be even worse than getting one fresh out of Sentinel School. And he knew exactly why he had been assigned to this unpleasant and frankly humiliating duty—by becoming the first Guide to qualify for Ranger School, and then having the temerity to actually _pass_ , he had all but announced that he was tough enough to handle anything the Army threw at him. And this, apparently, was what they had chosen to throw. 

Not quite ready to face a crying Sentinel just yet, Kas decided to report in to the drill sergeant first. “Guide Dillinger, reports as ordered,” he said, biting off the “Sir” that he almost added at the end. He was a sergeant, too, and this wretched situation would be slightly better if the other sergeant respected that. 

The man glanced over at him. “Jenkins, keep count!” One of the trainees got out of line and took up the count. Kas and the other sergeant took a few steps away from the trainees. “George Macon. Expected you this morning.”

“Problems with the transport,” Kas explained. Actually, he had been scheduled to arrive the night before and then get a few hours’ sleep before meeting the drill sergeant and his new Sentinel before the start of the training day, but every leg of his journey had been wracked with delays. First the civilian flight he had been scheduled to take boarded six hours later than it was supposed to, and then they had sat on the tarmac, for reasons that were never explained, for another three hours. Naturally, when he arrived at the airport, no one was there to pick him up, since they had expected him nine hours earlier. 

Macon grunted. “What else is new?” he asked rhetorically. “That one’s yours,” he added, pointing at the crying Sentinel.

Kas nodded, not mentioning that he could tell, since Temas was the only Sentinel in the group. “What’s, ah, what’s wrong with him?”

“Fuck if I know.” Jenkins, now, was standing over Temas and yelling something. “Jenkins, leave him alone!” Macon bellowed. He continued to Kas. “Liaison officer said you were coming to take him in hand, but he didn’t say what you’d be doing.”

“They didn’t tell me, either,” Kas admitted. He had hoped the drill sergeant would be able to fill him in. “My orders are that I report to him and to you.” That was unusual, too—Guides reported to their Sentinels, period, not to the Sentinel’s commanding officer. He hadn’t been sure how the DS would want to play it, either—Macon would be within his rights to treat Kas like he was one of the training class, rather than as a fellow NCO.

Macon whistled. “That is one fucked-up chain of command.”

Kas just nodded. Probably, the liaison officer and the training commander hadn’t been able to decide which was worse, having a Guide who technically outranked his Sentinel, or putting a trainee in command of a sergeant. Trainees never outranked anyone except other trainees, but Guides never outranked Sentinels, either. “My charge is to support him through successful completion of basic training,” he added. His orders had been silent on exactly how he was to do that. 

“That’ll be a job of work,” Macon said. “You see what he’s like. He can’t do anything, cries when you so much as look at him funny. Never seen anything like it. I’ve had some Guides in my training classes, and sometimes you have to baby them a little bit, but nothing like this.”

Kas hadn’t ever seen anything quite like Temas, either. “How about I observe for a while, and then we can talk about—what we’re going to do about him,” he suggested. As far as Kas could understand his orders, Macon could _tell_ him what they were going to do if he wanted to, but Macon seemed more relieved than anything to have Temas taken off his hands. 

Macon nodded and outlined the rest of the day. “After we finish up here, we’re going on a little run, then after chow they have a barracks inspection and some classroom training. You’d better go to chow with him.”

“Okay,” Kas said cautiously.

“You’ll see why,” he said. 

After supervising the rest of the pushups, Macon called the trainees to formation. The rest of them snapped to attention. Temas wobbled to his feet, sniffling and wiping at his face with his sleeve. Kas hadn’t been sure if he would even manage to stand up, so at least that was something. He was the tiniest Sentinel Kas had ever seen, a full head shorter than the trainees on either side of him. 

Temas flinched as Macon bellowed at the group to pick up their gear. _Sound sensitivity_ , he decided, relieved to see a sign of a problem that as a Guide he might actually be able to do something about. His relief dissipated when Temas fumbled with his pack as if he had never seen one before, even though this was the fifth week of training, and also he had presumably gotten it to the training field somehow just that morning. 

Kas wondered if there was such a thing as a mentally retarded Sentinel. Almost had to be, he decided, but wouldn’t they be exempt from the draft? He’d heard of a blind Sentinel before, and she had been exempt. 

When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he went over to his new Sentinel and took the tangled pack straps out of his hands. “Here,” he said, untangling them and holding the pack up for Temas to put on, like a mother helping at toddler into his coat. “Like this. Put your right arm through there—you got it.”

Temas blinked up at him moistly. “Thanks,” he said, almost inaudibly. “Nobody ever helps me,” he added mournfully.

Kas felt a pang of something he couldn’t identify. It might have been pity—the kid had been struggling for weeks, and nobody helped him? Or it might have been disgust, because who needed help putting his pack on more than halfway through basic, for Chrissake? Finally he just said, “My name’s Kas. I’m your Guide.”

Temas sniffled and blinked for a moment. “Angel,” he said, pronouncing it _Ahn_ -el. “You’re going to help me?”

“Yep,” Kas said. He picked up Angel’s rifle—he wasn’t sure Angel could reach it without falling over, carrying a pack that was almost as big as he was. Angel slung it awkwardly over his shoulder. “Here,” Kas said, adjusting it. “If you hold it like that—put your hand there—it won’t hit you in the ribs when you run.”

“I don’t like running,” Angel said irrelevantly. 

Kas decided not to even answer that. The rest of the group had taken off when Angel was still messing around with his pack. Kas could have caught up, but it was obvious Angel wasn’t going to. Kas waited for Angel to start running. After a moment it became obvious that he wasn’t going to. Guides were definitely not supposed to give their Sentinels orders, but if Angel was as slow as he seemed, Kas wasn’t going to be able to get him through Basic without some…prompting. “Come on,” he coaxed, moving off at a brisk walk. 

Angel stayed put for a few strides, but then apparently decided that compared with being separated from his new protector, moving was the lesser of two evils, and hurried after him. It didn’t seem to occur to him that he could order Kas to stay with him. 

By the time the rest of the training group lapped them, he had urged Angel into a slow, huffing trot, which he managed to keep up for almost a hundred yards before starting complaining that his feet hurt. He tried to sit down on the ground again, but Kas grabbed him by the collar and kept him walking. The second time the rest of the group passed them, Macon gave Kas a nod. Apparently, as hard as it might be to believe, this was actually an improvement over what Macon had come to expect from Angel. 

By the time they finished their first lap, the rest of the platoon were standing in formation back where they had started. Kas hesitated, unsure if they were supposed to keep going—and whether everyone else had done three laps or four—but Macon waved him toward the group. He deposited Angel in his spot in the formation, manhandled him into parade rest, and took up his own position just behind his Sentinel’s right shoulder. 

After a few friendly remarks about how they were the biggest bunch of pussies Macon had ever had the displeasure of training and how his grandmother could run faster with a full pack than this particular training group could—Angel sank further and further into himself during this, curling up like a hedgehog and only staying on his feet because Kas help him up—they marched off to chow.

Angel’s formation position was in the middle of the group, but Kas wasn’t able to keep him there—they hadn’t gone more than ten yards by the time Angel started falling back, dragging everyone else out of formation. Finally Kas hauled him off to the side, and they trailed the rest of the group to the chow hall. 

Angel managed to handle getting in line and having food slopped onto his tray without incident, but when the time came to take their trays to a table, he stopped dead, right in front of the Snake Pit, where the training evaluators sat. “Come on,” Kas said. “It’s not far.”

Angel didn’t move or make a sound. He was staring blankly at the ceiling fan that rotated slowly over the training evaluators’ table, zoned hard. Kas shoved his own tray into the hands of another trainee and rescued Angel’s just before it tipped onto the floor, passing that one to another trainee as well. 

Taking one of Angel’s hands in his, he shoved his sleeve up so he could touch the bare skin of his wrist. “Angel, listen to my voice…”

The evaluators and the other trainees were frankly staring, but Kas did his best to ignore them as he talked his Sentinel out of the zone. Angel came back slowly, blinking and twitching. That wasn’t good; faster recovery from zones was something they would have to work on. “Kas?” he said in wobbly voice, once he was back. “What happened?”

“You zoned,” Kas explained. “No big deal. Come on, let’s go eat.” 

“I lost my food,” Angel said, not sounding particularly concerned about it.

“One of the guys from your platoon has it.” 

“Oh.”

That explained why Macon had wanted him to go to chow with Angel. Did he do that every day? Every meal? And what the hell had his buddies been doing when they saw that happen, just standing there like a bunch of gaping assholes?

Then again, it had taken Kas a moment to realize what was actually happening, after only an hour of exposure to Angel’s standard cluelessness, and he was supposed to be a Guide. It was perhaps not completely unforgiveable if they others hadn’t realized he had a legitimate, Sentinel-related reason for acting like a total nutcase in that particular instance. 

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have a talk with the rest of the platoon about what to do when your unit’s Sentinel was in obvious sensory distress and there was no Guide available. 

When they made it to the table, their trays had been put down near the end of the table, a little distance from the rest of the group. The others were all mechanically shoveling in their lunch—beefaroni, canned peaches, and purple bug juice. Delicious. 

Actually, having just come off the mountain phase of Ranger School, Kas found that it tasted much better than he remembered from his own basic training. “You have to eat that,” he pointed out to Angel. 

“’m not hungry,” Angel said. 

“You still have to eat it.” If Angel cried during normal PT, Kas didn’t want to know what happened when he got smoked for failing to clean his plate at chow. 

“They don’t make me anymore.” 

That answered that. 

“After I threw up a bunch of times,” Angel added helpfully. 

“Well, at least eat some of it.”

“Not hungry.”

Kas ended up eating all of Angel’s Beefaroni—he was frankly afraid to try to shepherd Angel back past the Snake Pit with a full tray, no matter what he said—but coaxed him into eating a couple of peach slices. After Kas buttered it for him, he deigned to nibble at a piece of bread, too.

Compared to how he was in the morning, Angel didn’t do too badly during the classroom instruction. He slid into a couple of minor zones, and at one point tried to put his head down on his desk and take a nap, but Kas managed to bring him out of the zones and keep him at least looking like he was paying attention during the tactics lesson. 

He perked up considerably during the second lecture of the afternoon, on first aid. He took a few notes—so apparently if he was mentally deficient, he was at least able to read and write—and then, to Kas’s astonishment, answered a question about when it was appropriate to apply a tourniquet, in detail and without the distracted vagueness and childlike petulance that marked everything else Kas had heard him say. Oddly enough, the instructor did not seem surprised. 

After the lecture, the instructor handed out splints and told them to pair off and practice putting them on each other. Kas expected that Angel would be hopeless at that task—it was much more complicated than putting on a pack, and it wasn’t something he’d have had to do several times a day for the last few weeks—and wondered what he was going to do if Angel started to cry again. But Angel efficiently and correctly put the splint on his buddy’s leg, then talked the other trainee through how to apply his. “If you don’t have enough cloth to tie the splint off four or five times, like he said, the most important thing is to make sure you tie it off on either side of the break, and then do a third one on the distal end of the broken bone,” he explained, “so it doesn’t flop around. Four or five is better, but three is enough if you know where to put them.”

The instructor came up to check their work at the tail end of this explanation. “That’s right, Temas,” the instructor said. “In a field situation, it’s important to know how to make the best use of what you have.” She pronounced Angel’s split perfect and the other trainee’s acceptable, and told Angel to go help another pair who were having trouble. Angel’s response to this was a cheery, “Okay,” instead of the correct, “Yes, ma’am,” but the instructor didn’t say anything about it. 

After first aid, the rest of them marched in formation back to the barracks. He and Angel, as was becoming their habit, walked at the back. “So, you…like first aid class?” Kas asked. He wondered what it was about that class that made Angel capable of acting reasonably normal during it.

“Uh-huh. Nurse Chappel, she doesn’t yell. All of the others yell at me. And I’m going to be a doctor,” he added parenthetically, “so I have to learn that stuff.”

“A doctor,” Kas said dubiously. He didn’t think he had ever heard of a Sentinel being a doctor, and anyway, how was a guy who couldn’t put on his own rucksack supposed to get through medical school?

“Or I was,” Angel added with a sigh. “But they said I’m going to be in basic training forever.” 

“Who said that?” Kas had been wondering why in hell Angel was still here—if they thought he was actually as fragile and incompetent as he seemed, he ought to be discharged as psychologically unfit for service. If they thought he was faking it, he ought to be in the stockade. Even after only knowing him a short time, Kas didn’t much like the idea of Angel in military jail, but keeping him with his platoon while he was obviously not doing anything had to be a morale problem for the rest of the unit. 

Except, of course, most men would rather do any number of pushups than curl up and cry in front of the entire platoon. 

“The drill sergeant,” Angel said. 

“Macon?”

“No, the one before him. He was even meaner than Sergeant Macon. He said if I didn’t pass, I’d have to keep doing it for the whole six years. Or maybe twelve. They said if they were sending me to medical school, I had to sign up for at least twelve years. I didn’t ask if I have to stay the whole twelve if I never make it to medical school.” He sighed heavily. “But that’s why I said I’d do the Army; they were the only ones who promised to send me to medical school. The other ones just said maybe.”

“You enlisted in the Army with a guaranteed MOS of medical school?” Kas asked. If that was true, Angel had to be pretty smart; the Army wouldn’t have made that kind of promise, even to get a Sentinel, if it wasn’t realistic. And it also explained, or at least began to explain, why the Army was still keeping him around. If he had volunteered for the Army, and wasn’t part of their draft allotment, they wouldn’t get a replacement Sentinel if they threw him out. 

Angel nodded. “Guaranteed. My advisor at school said to make sure they put down guaranteed and not just requested.” 

“You must have done pretty well in school,” Kas said weakly. Not mentally deficient, then. 

“Straight A’s.” Angel nodded. “Well, except for marching band. I got C’s in marching band.”

“What about gym?” He couldn’t imagine a high school gym coach putting up with Angel’s antics…but then again, he wouldn’t have been able to imagine a drill sergeant putting up with them, either, except he had seen it with his own eyes.

“I took marching band instead.” 

Angel’s platoon’s bay was on the second floor of the barracks; at the bottom of the stairs Angel stopped to sigh and look up them wistfully. “My feet hurt.” 

“That’s why they call it boot camp,” Kas said. 

“I know. They let me have the same boots from last time, but my feet still hurt.” 

“You’ve been through Basic before?” Kas asked, starting up the stairs, hoping Angel would take the hint and follow him. He hadn’t been sure, when Angel had mentioned the other drill sergeant—Angel’s behavior could easily have driven a prior DS into the loony bin, requiring Sergeant Macon to be brought on as a substitute. 

Angel nodded. “Last time I had to go to the hospital at the end, but I wasn’t going to pass anyway.” 

By the time they made it up the stairs, the rest of the trainees were busy cleaning the bay. “Is there going to be an inspection?” Kas asked.

Angel shrugged, throwing his gear down on a bunk. “I don’t know. Nobody tells me these things.”

Kas asked one of the other trainees, who confirmed that yes, there was. “What are you supposed to be doing?” he asked Angel. “For an inspection?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Then let’s find out.” He had figured out that Jenkins was platoon leader, so he escorted Angel over to him and explained, “He’s not sure what his cleaning assignment is.”

Jenkins glanced nervously at his clipboard. “He doesn’t really have one, Sergeant.”

“Oh.”

“Whatever I put him down for, he won’t do it anyway.”

Angel shrank away. “Nobody tells me,” he said again.

“All right, let’s get your bunk and your locker squared away, then,” Kas decided. 

“That would be a change,” Jenkins said sourly, then added, “Sergeant.”

Kas hesitated. The other trainee’s open contempt was obviously adding to Angel’s distress, but then again, by not carrying his own weight, Angel had pretty much earned it. And since Angel apparently wasn’t mentally subnormal, he had no excuse. Finally, he just took Angel back to his bunk. 

Angel had at least, it appeared, made some effort to make up his bunk that morning. He’d even managed respectable hospital corners, but his blanket was upside-down, his pillow was facing the wrong way, and the dust cover was folded over the end of the bunk instead of over the pillow like it was supposed to be. Kas pointed out these errors to him.

“What difference does it make?”

Kas stared at him for a moment. So far Angel had displayed physical ineptitude, sensory fragility, complete lack of military discipline, and serious emotional instability, but this was the first time Kas had seen actual insubordination.

It took him another long moment, in which Angel regarded him with open curiosity, to realize that the question was completely sincere. “They want everyone to do it the same way,” Kas tried to explain. 

“But why that way?”

“There isn’t really a reason,” Kas said. He was pretty sure there wasn’t, anyway. “They just want everyone’s to be the same, and that’s the way they picked.” Angel still looked blank, so he continued, “It’s just when you’re in basic training. After that they don’t care which way your pillow is facing. But they want you to get used to doing things the way you’re told.”

“But it doesn’t make sense.”

Inspired, Kas said, “If you do it right, the drill sergeant doesn’t yell at you.” Since Angel didn’t like yelling, that ought to make sense to him. 

“They always find something to yell about,” Angel said. “It doesn’t matter how many things you get right.”

“Well, yeah,” Kas admitted. “They yell at everybody at first.”

“They never stop yelling.” Kas wondered if Angel even realized the extent to which Sergeant Macon and his squad-mates had given up on getting him to do anything. He couldn’t even imagine sitting down and crying in the middle of PT, or doing only one lap of a run instead of three or four, and there had been no yelling about any of it. But Angel looked near tears again. “I don’t know why they have to be so mean.”

There was really no way to answer that, and Jenkins was yelling about how they only had twenty minutes to go before inspection, so Kas said, “All right, let’s try to get your bunk made up the way it’s supposed to be.” 

Kas could have gotten Angel’s bunk area square and tight in less than the twenty minutes they had allotted to them, but he still wasn’t sure what his role was. Did ‘supporting him through successful completion’ mean just doing things for him? That would be the easiest way. On the other hand, sending such a helpless lump on to active duty was practically murder. The better way, the way he would do it unless explicitly ordered otherwise, was to give Angel as much emotional support and individual instruction as he needed, while still expecting him to actually do his own work.

Remembering Angel’s plaintive, “It doesn’t matter how many things you get right,” he took a deep breath and pointed to the crisp hospital corners on the sheets. “Here, this is good, this is exactly the way you’re supposed to do this. Now you want to take the blanket, make sure it’s centered on the bunk, and do exactly the same thing….”

By the time they finished with the bunk, they had about five minutes to work on Angel’s locker. It wasn’t quite the disaster area Kas had expected—his uniforms were hanging up, and his t-shirts and shorts were folded, but the uniforms were hanging every which way, some facing right and some facing left, and the folded t-shirts were folded into thirds instead of quarters. But when Kas showed him the right way, he did it without complaint and without asking why.

Still, they were far from finished when Sergeant Macon came into the barracks and the rest of the trainees came to attention at the ends of their bunks. When Kas indicated that Angel should do the same, Angel said, “But--” and looked back at the clothing that was still spread out on his bunk. 

“I know,” Kas said in an undertone. Not being ready for inspection was bad. Not coming to attention when ordered to do so was worse. But if Angel completely shut down when he was being yelled at, he probably hadn’t figured that out. “Come on.”

Kas waited with dread while Macon walked down the row of bunks, eyeballing each trainee and each bunk area. The normal thing for Macon to do, when he saw the half-finished state of Angel’s area, would be to flip the mattress off the bunk, throw everything from his locker on the floor, and scream at him while he put it back to rights. Kas could have dealt with that just fine, if it had been him, but he had a feeling it would make Angel cry, and—given that it looked like this represented his personal best effort at getting his area ready for inspection, Kas could understand how he would feel about it. What Angel had accomplished was nowhere near good enough, but at least he was trying. 

Angel didn’t do a particularly good job of staying at attention, and kept looking over his shoulder at Kas. Finally Kas clamped a reassuring hand on his Sentinel’s neck, so that Angel would know he was there without turning around to look at him. Angel trembled as the drill sergeant approached. 

When he saw Angel’s bunk, Macon sighed heavily. “Temas,” he began, sounding more exasperated than angry. Angel whimpered. 

Kas caught Macon’s eye and thought at him, _don’t yell, don’t yell, come on, you can see he’s about a half a second away from freaking right the fuck out._

Guides weren’t supposed to be able to mentally connect with normals, but somehow, Macon got the message. “Keep working with him,” he told Kas. “I’ll check again when I’m done with the others.”

Kas almost sagged with relief. Angel actually did, turning back to face Kas and leaning against his chest for a moment. Kas patted him. “Okay. Let’s see how much else we can get done, all right?”

There were a few things they couldn’t fix in time. His spare pair of boots badly needed a polish, and there were some stray threads hanging off of his Class A’s, and there was no time to do anything about that. Ditto the deplorable state of his toothpaste tube and soap dish. While they worked, two other trainees got their bunk areas trashed, and four or five others started cranking out pushups for more minor infractions. Angel so obviously getting special treatment from the DS couldn’t possibly help fix his damaged relationship with his platoon, but honestly, Kas wasn’t sure if there was any way it could make things worse. Each time another trainee got yelled at, Angel tensed up and flinched, but Kas brought his attention back to what he was supposed to be doing. “That’s not any of your business. Nothing for you to worry about. Stay in your lane.” 

When Sergeant Macon came around again, though, Angel’s bunk area was more-or-less squared away. Not perfect, but probably not much worse than what the DS would expect from a normal trainee two or three weeks into basic. Meaning, there was still plenty left for Macon to yell about. Kas tried to decide what he would do when that started. He was going to have to talk to Macon about Angel’s inability to cope with yelling, and ask him to be a little gentler with him, but the middle of an inspection definitely wasn’t the time. Honestly, there wasn’t a time, but he could see he was going to have to do it. But for now, keep his mouth shut, and reassure Angel after, that was the way to go. Should he stay at attention, or would it be all right to, say, give Angel a hug when he started crying? 

And honestly, how far down the rabbit hole had he gone in one short day that he was even thinking those words? God, this was a fucked-up assignment. But as exasperating as Angel was, Kas couldn’t help but like him. 

But when Macon re-inspected Angel’s area, he didn’t do more than glance over the bunk. He didn’t even look inside the locker. He just caught Kas’s eye and nodded slightly, then went back to check on the trainees who had gotten their bunks flipped. 

That was…anticlimactic. “See what I mean?” Angel said. “Look, he didn’t even notice.”

“He didn’t yell,” Kas pointed out. “That means you did okay.” He was pretty sure it actually meant that Macon no longer gave a shit what Angel did, but if Angel didn’t know that, Kas wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. 

“Well, they should tell you when you did okay.”

“I’ll tell you,” Kas said. “You did okay.” 

Angel hugged him. Kas could already tell this assignment was going to involve an unusual amount of hugging. Not manly hugging, with hearty back-slapping and cries of “You old son of a bitch,” either. Angel held on tight to him, resting his head on Kas’s shoulder. 

After the inspection was over, the trainees had a half-hour free before chow. Angel chose to spend it lying down. Kas went down to Sergeant Macon’s office and knocked on the door. 

“Report!” Macon bellowed from inside.

“Sergeant Dillinger,” Kas said, unsure if he should add, “reports as ordered.”

“Come in,” Macon called, in a more normal tone of voice. Inside, Macon was filling out some paperwork. “Have a seat. Coffee? It’s over there.”

“Thanks.” Kas poured himself a cup. 

“Well,” Macon said after a moment. “This was the only time since his first day that Temas so much as got off his ass for an inspection.” 

“I gathered,” Kas said dryly. “His feelings were hurt that you didn’t say anything about his hard work.”

“I figured you knew how to prepare his area for an inspection.”

“I didn’t do it,” Kas said. “He did. Most of it.”

Macon glanced up. “Really? I’ve never seen a Sentinel lift a finger when he had a Guide there to do it for him.”

“I already passed Basic; he won’t learn anything if I do it for him.” After hesitating a moment, he added, “I don’t think he knows he could order me to do it for him. I was thinking I’d not tell him. If that’s all right with you.”

“Dillinger, if you can keep him from fucking up the rest of my platoon, I’ll shake you by the hand. If you can get him to actually do anything, I’ll kiss you.” 

“Unless you’re a Sentinel, I’m pretty sure that’s against regs,” Kas pointed out. Encouraged by Macon’s reasonable attitude, he continued, “It’s not doing him any good, letting him get away with not doing a goddamn thing. He’s a Sentinel. Unless the Army throws him back, he’s going to be an officer.”

Both sergeants shuddered. “I hear you,” Macon said. “But if I try to make him do anything, he bawls like a baby. I don’t have to tell you that’s bad for morale. I have to think about the other forty-eight of them.”

“You do,” Kas agreed. “I only have him to worry about. That might be what he needs. I don’t know.”

Macon shook his head. “He had some kind of nervous breakdown near the end of his last time in Basic. Hang on.” He turned to pull out the drawer of a filing cabinet and pulled out a file. “That’s all his paperwork. Medical records, test scores, everything they gave me.”

Kas looked through it. The file was sparse, but a quick glance through it showed a few significant details. “His fitness test scores have been going down the entire time he’s been here. Scores on his second test was slightly better than his induction test, but ever since then he’s been getting worse.”

“Yeah?” Macon said, looking up. “Let me see.”

“Here,” Kas said, pointing it out.

“I didn’t see that. Thought he was hopeless from the time he got here. These first two scores are bad, but I’ve seen worse.” Macon sat back and folded a stick of gum into his mouth. “I shoulda caught that. Shit.” 

He really should have, but Kas remained tactfully silent. “So we know he can do better. The way I figure it, if it doesn’t matter whether he does his best or does jack shit, he might as well give up. The last DS told him he’d be in Basic for his entire hitch, and as far as I can tell he took it for gospel truth.”

Macon snorted. “Shit.”

“I don’t think he has the common sense God gave a gnat,” Kas agreed. “But he seems like a nice kid. I’ll try giving him some encouragement. So far, it’s looking like he’ll make an effort if he gets the idea somebody cares if he tries.”

“I’d give him some encouragement if he ever did anything right,” Macon said, sounding slightly offended. 

“If I remember my own Basic, it takes about four or five weeks before anybody does anything right,” Kas said. 

“’bout that,” Macon agreed.

“That might be too long for him. It’s not your job to praise him for every little thing,” Kas noted, before Macon could point that out, “and if you did, it would destroy your authority with the rest of the platoon. But I can, and I think that’ll help.”

“Hope so,” Macon said. “I really don’t want him here for six years.”

“He can pass,” Kas said, with more confidence than he really felt. So far, acting as though participating in whatever the platoon was doing was not at all optional—which it shouldn’t have been, anyway—was working pretty well. He was growing more sure that convincing Angel that passing Basic was not only possible, it was downright expected was the only way to get him to try. 

“Not in three weeks. They have the field exercise next week, and then testing the week after that.”

Kas had to admit he was right. No matter how optimistic he tried to be, Angel was nowhere near ready. “So for the next three weeks, we’ll work on getting him back to where he was when he got here,” Kas essayed. “And he’ll pass next time.”

“If that’s what he’s doing, he ought to be in fat camp,” Macon pointed out, referring to the remedial training unit for recruits who couldn’t pass the fitness tests. The training consisted of nothing but fitness tests, all day every day, supervised by the meanest drill sergeants the Army had to offer.

“That wouldn’t do him any good,” Kas said. “He needs…hell, I don’t know what he needs, but he seems to sort of like classroom work. Spending some of his time doing something he’s good at has to help.”

Macon nodded. “Don’t know about that, but they won’t let me send him to fat camp, anyway. All right. So he stays with the unit, and you pull him out for individual instruction whenever he needs it, like you did today.”

“Sounds good,” Kas agreed. “We know he can run—sort of run—a quarter mile, and he can do--” Kas checked Temas’s last fitness test, “—four pushups. Four? Christ. I’m pretty sure my grandmother really can do more than four. Where do we want him to be by the next fitness test?”

“Minimum to pass is thirty-five push-ups, forty-seven sit-ups, and two miles in sixteen minutes thirty seconds,” Macon recited. 

“Right,” Kas said, realizing Macon didn’t quite get what he was asking. “He’s not going to do that. But if we can give him some kind of a goal to shoot for.”

“Passing is the goal.”

“I know,” Kas said patiently. “But I’d like to tell him we’re sure he can manage to do, I don’t know, ten push-ups, fifteen sit-ups and half a mile. The then next test, we’ll say fifteen or twenty push-ups, and so on. See what I mean?”

Macon nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I get it. Like when you’re training a hound dog. The first time he goes and gets the rabbit, you say good dog even if he dropped it halfway back.”

“Just like that,” Kas agreed. “It’ll keep his morale up, if he can see that he’s getting better.”

They hammered out a plan. Kas made up the goals, but they agreed to present them as Macon’s orders, since Kas was in no position to be giving his Sentinel orders, and anyway, that would let Angel keep thinking of him as the nice one. 

Back in the barracks, Angel was curled up on the bunk, his pillow over his head. The rest of the trainees seemed to all be talking at once, and with almost fifty of them, the volume was pretty high. Even Kas was relieved when Macon came back into the barracks and they all shut up. 

As the rest of the platoon double-timed it over to the chow hall and Angel trudged along after them, Kas said, “Didn’t you say you were in marching band in school?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So how is it you don’t know how to march?”

“They don’t do it the same way. And I wasn’t any good at it then, either.”

“Oh.” They’d have to work on marching, too. Along with everything else. 

This time, Kas held his tray one-handed and kept the other hand on Angel as they went from the chow line to the table, and Angel managed to get there without zoning. The night’s menu was one of the better ones—meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans—but Angel occupied himself tracing crisscross patterns in the potatoes with his fork, instead of eating. 

“You need to eat,” Kas told him.

“Not hungry.”

“You didn’t have any lunch.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“It might hurt because there’s nothing in it,” Kas suggested. He cut one of Angel’s two slices of meatloaf in half. “Eat that part.” 

Angel managed to choke down most of the section of meatloaf Kas had indicated, three miniscule bites of mashed potatoes, and about half a green bean. 

Back at the barracks, Macon talked to the trainees about grenades—apparently they were going to the grenade range tomorrow. Angel shuddered and muttered about how much he hated grenades, and how he didn’t know why they had to be so loud. After the lecture, Macon announced, “Sergeant Dillinger will be assisting Private Temas. You will show him the respect due his rank. Dismissed.”

Angel looked at him, wide-eyed. “That’s you?”

“Yep.”

Angel kept looking at him skeptically. 

Deciding that he was probably just as confused by the chain of command issues as anyone else, Kas said, “Don’t worry about it. We have about an hour before lights-out; what do you need to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay. I’m going to take a shower,” Kas decided.

“I’ll come with you. Can I come with you?”

“Sure.” 

The complete lack of anything resembling privacy was possibly Kas’s least favorite thing about Basic, but after Ranger School, taking a real shower with actual hot water felt like a luxury, even if there were ten other men in the room. He was relieved to see that Angel at least knew how to keep his eyes to himself, although he did appear to believe they only needed one shower head between them. Kas wondered if the other trainees had given him reason to be afraid to take a shower by himself, or if it was just another example of Angel being weird. Well, if the others were giving Angel a hard time, it was going to stop. 

Kas glanced at him, briefly breaking the “eyes to yourself” rules, checking for suspicious bruises. He didn’t find any, but he did see that Angel was dangerously thin. Hell, he looked like a walking hat rack.

He had assumed that Angel was just off his feed that day—or maybe even was refusing to eat for attention—but it was starting to look more like hardly ate at all. That would go a long way to explaining why he couldn’t run or even march; he just didn’t have the energy for it. 

When they were getting dressed again, he noticed another problem. “What the hell is wrong with your _feet_?”

Angel glanced down at them. “They hurt.” 

“Yeah,” Kas said. “Sit down a minute, let me see.” After Angel sat down, Kas took one of his feet into his lap. His ankle, instep, and heel were raw, with crusty patches. “Let me see your boots.” 

He examined Angel’s boots. They looked fine, pretty well broken in, with no rough seams or other problems. And the problem with Angel’s feet didn’t look like the normal blisters that you had to expect in boot camp. “You need to get these looked at.”

“I did,” Angel said. “They didn’t do anything, they just said that’s why they call it boot camp. Like you did,” he added. 

“When was that?”

“A long time ago. When I first got here.”

“Okay. Yeah, it’s normal for your feet to hurt then, but this isn’t normal. If you’ve been wearing those boots for, what, three months? They should be fine.” 

“They said to oil my boots more, but I tried that, and it didn’t help. And they said put band-aids on the blisters, but that made it worse.”

Kas was getting an idea. “Let me see your socks.” 

Obediently, Angel got out his socks. They were the standard military-issue black socks. Now he was pretty sure he knew what the problem was. “This is fixable,” he said. “Sign up for tomorrow’s sick call.”

“I don’t know how.” 

Kas did, but he would go stark raving mad if he was stuck for eleven weeks with a Sentinel who acted like he was completely helpless. Patiently, he said, “Well, let’s think. How could you find out?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Do you think your platoon leader might know?” he suggested. 

“No.” 

“I think he probably would.” 

“I guess you could ask him,” Angel said with a sigh. 

“Or you could ask him.” Angel looked very dubious about that, so Kas added, “I’ll go with you.”

Angel seemed highly skeptical that this would work, but he went and asked, with a decided air of humoring Kas. Jenkins gave him the information he asked for, perfectly civilly. Kas had no idea whether it would have happened the same way if he hadn’t been looming over Angel’s shoulder when he asked. 

“You might want to find out if you have fire guard tonight, too,” Kas suggested.

“They don’t make me do that,” Angel said. 

“You should be doing that,” Kas said. “Everybody’s supposed to take turns, and if you don’t do yours, somebody else has to do it for you.” 

“Oh.” Angel digested that, chewing on his lip. “Well, okay. I don’t sleep, anyway. But sometimes the drill sergeant’s friends try to trick you, and then they wake everybody up. With the yelling. And then everybody’s mad at me.”

“Uh-huh,” Kas said. “I’ll go with you and make sure you know what to do. Put him back on the schedule, please,” Kas said to Jenkins.

“Yes, Sergeant. Did you want him on tonight?”

“Whatever you think is fair,” Kas said. He didn’t want to be in the position of deciding what Angel had to do and what he didn’t—that wasn’t much better than Angel picking and choosing what orders he felt like following. If Angel was going to improve at all, everybody had to start holding him to reasonable expectations. 

“The first shift tonight should be pretty quiet, Sergeant,” Jenkins suggested.

“That’s fine.”

“There are supposed to be two trainees on duty, Sergeant,” Jenkins added. “Do you….”

“No, I don’t think I count,” Kas said. “I already passed Basic. I’ll be there if Angel—if Temas—needs assistance, but everyone else should pretend I’m not there.” 

“Yes, Sergeant. Tocher,” he yelled, “you’re off fire watch. Perlman, you have Temas on with you.”

Kas was fairly sure he heard someone, probably Perlman, say, “Oh, God.” 

Angel had to get back into uniform for his guard shift, so Kas helped him wrap his feet in gauze and provided him with a pair of his own socks, thicker than the standard issue. After lights out, Perlman made his first patrol and then settled down with a penlight and his training manual. Angel looked like he would have been content to stare at the wall until it was time for the next patrol, but Kas sent him back to his bunk for his own manual. 

Given that Angel had to be fairly intelligent, Kas was more surprised than he probably should have been to learn that Angel hadn’t learned the ranks, rules of combat, or any of the other things he was supposed to have memorized out of his manual. Angel reverted to trembling and whining that he didn’t know, nobody told him anything, when Kas began quizzing him on them. 

Sergeant Macon must have given up on holding him responsible for the written material, too. Then again, when drill sergeants quizzed trainees on that material, it usually involved a lot of yelling and being dropped to do pushups for unsatisfactory answers. Probably that made Angel cry, too. 

“There’s a written test on all this stuff at the end,” Kas explained. Even if Macon didn’t drill him on it, Angel would be expected to pass that, and he was _clearly_ capable of it. “So you have to learn it. It’s not that hard; just stay calm. Here.” He handed Angel his manual back. “Let’s start over, and you look up the answers, okay? Start with the enlisted ranks.”

“I don’t know,” Angel said again.

“It’s in the book. Just look for it. We have plenty of time, nothing to worry about.”

“Where is it?” Angel asked, paging randomly through the manual. 

Kas took a deep breath and reminded himself to stay calm. “You know how books work. What can you use to find the part of the book you want?”

With that prompt, Angel remembered what a table of contents was for. He found the chart of ranks and insignia. “So it goes private, then private again—why is ‘private first class’ the second one?”

“It just is.”

“First should be first, and second should be second,” Angel insisted.

“It’s first like a first-class compartment on a train, or first class on an airplane,” Kas explained. “First is higher.”

“But it’s not the highest.”

“It’s the highest of the privates.”

“But then in Sergeants there’s first class again, and that one isn’t the highest; it’s in the middle.”

“You just have to memorize it,” Kas said. 

“And then after Sergeant first class, there’s master sergeant, and then first sergeant. It’s confusing. They should make the names more different.”

“Maybe they should, but you’re not going to. Everything after Master Sergeant, you’ll probably never see one. You just have to know it for the test.”

“Which one are you?”

Kas showed him the insignia on his shoulder. “See if you can figure it out.”

Angel looked back and forth between Kas’s shoulder patch and the book. “Just regular Sergeant?”

“Right.” 

Angel beamed at him. “Okay. So it’s private with no insignia, private with one of those triangle-thingies, private first class, then sergeants like you, then, uh…which one of the first ones was next?” 

“Look in the book,” Kas suggested, wondering if Angel would notice that he’d skipped Corporal entirely. 

“Oh. Right. Sergeant first class. Then Sergeant major.”

“Not quite.”

“Master Sergeant,” Angel read, with a sigh. “Those names are too close, too.”

Their shift on fire guard passed without incident—Kas wasn’t sure if that meant Macon didn’t know Angel was on watch, or that he did—and by the time they had finished, Angel seemed to have most of the ranks straight, although he always forgot Corporal, even if he was looking right at the chart. 

Still, he was able to answer the questions without panicking, so Kas felt like they’d made some progress. They woke up the guy who had the next shift and went to bed.

In the bunk above Angel’s, Kas lay there and listened to Angel toss and turn and mutter to himself. He was not terribly surprised when, after about ten minutes of that, Angel popped out of bed. Folding his arms on te edge of Kas’s bunk, he rested his chin on them and said, “I can’t sleep.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Kas asked, irritated. 0500 was coming up fast, and if Angel wasn’t bothering him, he’d sleep fine.

“I don’t know,” Angel whined.

Of course he didn’t. “Go back to bed.”

“Did you know that you can die from not sleeping?”

“Uh-huh. You can also be killed from it.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” He was damn lucky that what was essentially a veiled threat on his Sentinel’s life had gone straight over the Sentinel’s head. By now, the guy in the next bunk had woken up and was glaring murderously at them. Kas got up and guided Angel back into his bunk. “Lay down. Here.” He tugged the blankets up over Angel, tucking him in. “Shut your eyes.”

Angel shut his eyes, but said, “I still can’t sleep.”

“Pretend.” 

Kas wasn’t sure if Angel did go to sleep, but the next time Angel bothered him again it was to say, “The drill sergeant’s going to be in here in about a minute.”

Sleep fogged, Kas wondered how he knew, but Angel continued, “His alarm clock just went off, and it takes him a minute and a half to get dressed.”

“Okay,” Kas said, scrubbing a hand over his face and sitting up. Nobody else was awake yet, and in the quiet of the barracks, even Kas could hear the door to the DS’s quarters creaking open. Angel winced and cowered against Kas’s chest as Sergeant Macon woke the rest of the platoon by banging two metal garbage can lids together. 

Morning wake-up calls in Basic were always cacophonously unpleasant, but Kas, along with every other soldier in existence, had gotten used to it. With a sound-sensitive Sentinel clutching him for dear life, though, it seemed unnecessarily cruel. He wouldn’t be surprised if one of the things Angel did instead of sleeping was lie awake dreading a very painful morning. 

He briefly entertained the notion of asking Sergeant Macon not to do that anymore, but he knew better than to ask—hell, even Angel apparently knew better than to ask. What he had to do instead was help Angel find some way to cope. 

For now, though…he wasn’t really supposed to do this, but Angel wouldn’t know any better. He adjusted his grip on Angel so he could slip one hand under his t-shirt and lay his palm flat on his back, and opened a working link. Angel looked up at him, startled. “Okay?” Kas asked.

Angel nodded uncertainly.

“Okay.” Now—this was the part he really shouldn’t be doing; shouldn’t even be able to do—he reached and adjusted Angel’s hearing down to a tolerable level.

It was a trick he had figured out when an earlier Sentinel broke his leg and zoned on the pain. He wasn’t sure if it would work for hearing, but the distinct sense of relief that he got from Angel signaled that it had. Angel sagged against him. “How’d you do that?”

“I’ll show you how later.” The other trainees were standing at attention at the ends of their bunks; Kas dragged Angel over to stand near the right place, and got him to stand up more or less straight instead of clinging to Kas like a vine. 

When Macon looked them over, Kas prompted Angel, “Now’s when you tell him you want to go on sick call.”

Macon gave Kas a highly skeptical look—apparently the one thing Angel hadn’t done so far was reporting sick to get out of training, and Angel whimpered.

“Do you remember what you’re supposed to say?” Kas asked.

Angel claimed he didn’t. Macon, looking distinctly embarrassed to even witness Angel’s carryings-on, probably would not have cared if Kas reported for him, but Kas told Angel what to say and made him repeat it. 

Macon, giving Kas another one of those looks, said, “You’ll report to PT and participate to the degree that you are able, and you’ll be escorted to the clinic afterwards.”

That was, Kas knew, a pretty neutral statement of the relevant regulation, delivered without any editorial commentary or dire threats about what would happen if Angel was malingering, as Macon clearly suspected he was. 

After the DS dismissed the platoon to get ready for the day, Kas left Angel brushing his teeth—one thing he was apparently capable of doing without supervision and reassurance—and went to Macon’s office. 

Macon gave him a look that said, _I thought we were on the same side here, pal_. 

“He has a genuine medical complaint,” Kas told him. “I have no idea why he hasn’t been milking it for all its worth. I think he was afraid to say anything.”

Macon still looked skeptical, but he said, “If you say so.”

“Are they running this morning?”

Macon shook his head. “Calisthenics today.”

“Okay, good. He should be able to do some.”

“That would be a first.”

“He’s been pretty cooperative with me so far.”

Those proved to be famous last words. When Macon ordered the rest of the platoon to drop for pushups, Angel did not fall to the ground crying. Unfortunately, what he did instead was stand next to Kas watching the others with an air of mild interest, as if the rest of his platoon were a not-very-interesting museum exhibit. 

“Angel,” Kas said. 

“Hm?”

“Do you think, maybe, you could do a pushup or two?”

Angel looked frankly betrayed, as if he couldn’t imagine why his beloved Kas would ask him to do such a thing. Finally he said, “No.”

“I think you can.” 

Angel shook his head. “No,” he said sadly. “I can’t.”

Somehow, he had lost whatever tactical advantage he had once had. Before, Angel had apparently just been humoring him, or perhaps luring him into a false sense of complacency. And Kas’s former go-to strategy of saying, “I’ll go with you,” was useless here. 

Finally he said, “Yes, you can,” even though he _knew_ that Angel was just going to say, “No, I can’t.”

Which was exactly what he did. Kas ran through options in his head. Knocking Angel down and physically forcing him to do one single goddamn pushup was looking pretty attractive, but he didn’t think he could get away with that. 

“Try,” he said instead. 

Angel didn’t have an answer for that. He apparently realized it would be patently ridiculous to claim he couldn’t _try_ , but neither did he bow to Kas’s superior logic. He just stood there and sniffled. 

“For Christ’s sake, do you _want_ to be in Basic training for the rest of your goddamn life?” Kas demanded. Now he understood why Macon had given up on Angel—it was either that or strangle the little shit, with his big eyes and his—Christ, now he _was_ crying.

“No,” Angel hiccupped. “I want to--” sniff “—go home.”

“Well, after you finish Basic you get to go home.”

“No you don’t.” And there he was on the ground again. 

Kas knelt down next to him. “Yeah, you do. You get ten days’ leave at the end.”

“They didn’t let me before.”

“That’s because you didn’t pass,” Kas said patiently. 

“I’m never gonna pass,” Angel wailed.

“Yes, you are. Promise.”

Angel shook his head. “No I’m not.”

“You’re not going to pass this time,” Kas admitted. He had planned on filling Angel in on the plan a little later, concerned that if he knew he wasn’t passing this time he would give up—or rather, keep giving up. But apparently he had already figured that much out. “We’re going to work on the things you’re having the most trouble with for the rest of this session, and then you’ll start over with the next group and by then you’ll be ready, and you’ll have me there to help you, and you’ll pass. And then you your leave, and you you can go home.”

“What happens when you don’t pass?”

“You already know what happens,” Kas said. “You have to stay here and start over again.”

Angel nodded. “That’s what’ll happen. I’ll have to stay here and do it over again.”

“You will if you keep carrying on like this,” Kas agreed. “If you want to pass, you’re going to have to work really hard, and if you want to be ready to pass next time, you’re going to have to start now. Look,” he added, counting forward on the calendar. “If you play your cards right, you can be home over Christmas. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

Angel began to look slightly hopeful. “Yeah,” he agreed with another sniffle.

“Great,” Kas said. “So about that pushup.”

Angel wilted again. But with some more coaxing, Kas finally got him to do one pushup. He had hoped to start with four, but when he finally got one, with passably decent form, he decided to declare victory. 

“Perfect,” Kas told him. “Now you just need to do thirty-four more like that.”

“Thirty- _four_? I can’t do thirty-four!”

“Not today,” Kas soothed him. “But now you know you can do one. Tomorrow we’ll see if you can do two.” 

Angel still looked skeptical.

“You’ll see. Now, sit-ups are easier,” he said, hoping to avoid another lengthy conversation. Briskly, he continued, “Lay down on your back.” 

He broke the sit-up process down into the smallest possible steps, and Angel didn’t balk. He could lay down. He could bend his knees and put his feet flat against the ground. He could put his hands behind his head. And by the time he had done all of that, apparently even he thought it was reasonable to humor Kas by at least trying to sit up. 

“Good. That’s it. Back down—this time, try not to twist your spine while you’re sitting up. You want to use these muscles here,” he said, patting Angel’s abdomen.

Angel sat up again, still twisting. 

“Better,” Kas said, even though it wasn’t. “Here, watch how I do it.” 

He did a couple of sit-ups, then had the inspired idea of having Angel put his hands on him to feel what muscles were involved. When Angel tried again, his third sit-up was…

Still pretty bad, really, but he sincerely said, “Much better.” By that point, the rest of the platoon was finished with PT, and they marched off to chow, where, naturally, Angel didn’t eat. He did drink a glass each of orange juice and milk, saying that he didn’t want to come down with rickets or scurvy. Kas ate both of their helpings of reconstituted eggs, and entered into intense negotiations with Angel over the subject of his eating half a slice of Spam. Under Angel’s insistence that he would throw up if he ate so much as a crumb of it, Kas had to give in. Angel, gracious in victory, deigned to eat a quarter of a piece of toast with grape jelly. 

Angel’s relief was undisguised when the rest of the platoon went off to the rifle range and he got to go to the infirmary instead. He talked a little bit about home—apparently he was raised by a single mother and his grandparents—but clammed up again when he got to the clinic. When the triage nurse asked what his complaint was, he said sullenly, “My feet hurt.”

“That’s why they call it boot camp, soldier,” the nurse told him. “What you need to do is make sure you oil those boots every night, and put band-aids over the blisters until your feet toughen up.”

“See?” Angel told him.

“Maybe give her a little more detail about the problem,” Kas suggested.

“It’s not blisters,” Angel said. “Some kind of rash.”

She sighed heavily. “Let me take a look.”

When she actually looked, the nurse suggested that it looked like poison ivy, and asked Angel if he had been walking around in the woods with his shoes off. Angel denied that he had been, but the nurse said, “Well, if it’s poison, it’ll clear up in a week or two.”

Kas had hoped the medical staff would figure it out on their own—a nurse was an officer, and he knew better than to tell officers how to do their jobs—but he _was_ Angel’s Guide, and he had a clear duty to advocate for his Sentinel. He cleared his throat and said, “Ma’am.”

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“It’s not unusual for Sentinels to be sensitive to the dye used in standard-issue socks.”

She looked at Angel and back at Kas. “You’re a Sentinel?” she asked, clearly not quite able to reconcile Angel with the image most people had of Sentinels. 

“He is, ma’am.” He adjusted his collar, drawing attention to the Guide patches there.

“I see. I’ve never heard of a Sentinel having trouble with his socks.”

“I have, ma’am.”

Fortunately, she was prepared to take his word for it, at least far enough to refer Angel to an expert in Sentinel medicine. She parked Angel on a curtained-off gurney and they waited.

“Socks?” Angel asked after a while.

“Yep.” Most of what Kas knew about Sentinels came from other Guides, but that one, he’d actually heard about from a Sentinel, not too long ago. 

“That could be it,” Angel said. “It didn’t start until I got here. I brought my own socks, but they took them away when I first got here.”

“Yeah, they do that. You need a medical excuse to wear different socks.”

Eventually, the specialist came. “Temas. I should have guessed.”

“Hi,” Angel said, with a little wave. 

Much like the nurse from the day before, the doctor didn’t seem surprised at Angel’s decidedly un-military form of address, but Kas took the opportunity to say, “Try, ‘Private Temas reports as ordered, sir.’”

“He didn’t order me to come here,” Angel pointed out. “And the other ones yell at you when you call them sir. Something about working for a living.”

“Right, that would be the sergeants. Doctor--” Kas glanced at the man’s name tag “—Whitmore is an officer.” A Captain, to be specific, but he wouldn’t bother Angel with that detail.

“Doctors work for a living,” Angel insisted.

Kas sighed. “Right, but--”

“Guide,” Whitmore said. 

Kas stopped short. “Sir?”

“I’m talking to your Sentinel here.”

Right. Somehow, after a day in the Angel Zone, he had forgotten that a Guide’s job was to be silent unless spoken to. There was no way he could follow that rule and do his duty by Angel, but he ought to at least follow it in front of rank.

Except, of course, Angel would have no idea why he was doing that, and even now he was looking back and forth between Kas and Whitmore, confused. “Kas?”

There, now that he was officially spoken to, he could say, “I’ll explain it later.” 

Angel nodded uncertainly.

“It’s your feet this time, Temas?” Whitmore asked.

“Uh-huh. Um, sir. Kas says it’s my socks.”

“I suppose it could be,” Whitemore said, examining Angel’s feet. “Sensitivity to detergent or fabric softener is more common.”

“Well,” Angel said, chewing on his thumbnail, “it’s only my feet. And I think they wash everything in the same detergent.”

“Yes, they do,” Whitmore agreed. He did a scratch test on Angel’s arm, with Angel taking an active interest in the proceedings. 

While they waited for the result, the doctor asked Angel if he had any other concerns. Angel, bizarrely enough, said no. Even though he’d been smacked down just a few minutes before, Kas knew he had to say something. “I have a few.” He added, “Sir. Sentinel.”

“You do?” Angel asked. “Are you okay? You should have said something.”

“Concerns about you,” Kas explained. 

“What kind of concerns?”

“He’s not eating. Very little, anyway. He’s dropped some amazing amount of weight since he got here. And he’s not sleeping much, either.” He only had one night’s evidence of the latter, but he did have Angel’s word that he “didn’t sleep,” and if a fairly bright kid was unable to remember anything he learned, exhaustion almost had to be a factor. 

Whitmore nodded. “We’re aware of those problems. They appear to be stress-related. We did a thorough workup when he was hospitalized before, and ruled out a physical cause.”

“Those— _problems_ ,” Kas pointed out, “need to be resolved, for him to successfully complete his training. Sir.”

“It’s my understanding that’s why you’re here, Guide.” 

Funny how everyone he encountered seemed to have a slightly different understanding of why he was here. “Sir.”

Whitmore turned over Angel’s arm and examined the scratch test patch. “Looks like your Guide guessed right about the socks. I’ll write orders that you’re to have hypo-allergenic , un-dyed socks.”

“Thanks,” Angel said. 

He wrote out the orders and handed the slip to Angel, who looked at it for a moment, then handed it off to Kas. Kas was pretty sure it was because he had no idea what to do with it, but it looked all right, since most Sentinels considered themselves above paperwork. 

When they rejoined the platoon, they were finished on the rifle range and just starting on bayonet drill. The rest of the trainees were stabbing at dummies with bayonets and yelling things like, “Kill, kill, kill!” and “Blood makes the grass grow!” 

Angel looked up at him. “You’re going to make me do that, aren’t you.”

“Uh-huh. I know, it’s stupid. But there’s a test on that, too.”

“There is?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to do very well on it, but you have to do it.”

After Kas showed him how to fix his bayonet, Angel managed a few feeble pokes at the training dummies. He strolled up to them in an embarrassed slouch instead of running up to them, but Kas was reasonably sure that this, too, was progress. 

On the grenade range, another platoon was already practicing. Angel visibly flinched away from every explosion before they were even close. Working on his auditory sensitivity, Kas decided, was more important than the grenade lesson; he could pick that up next time around. He sat Angel down and went over how to start a working link. 

“Is that what you did before? This morning?”

“Yeah. It’s—what Guides are for. You’ll learn how to do it in Sentinel School, but I don’t think you can wait that long.” He held out his hand.

Angel took it, and they linked up. “That’s…nice.”

Kas nodded. “Now, what you want to do is imagine a dial.”

“Can’t you just do it, like you did before?”

“Once you learn how, you can do it without being linked up,” Kas explained. “Now, concentrate on that dial. Turn it down, a little bit at a time.” He could feel it going down, somehow. He knew there were a lot of Guides who had no idea where their Sentinels’ dials were without asking, but had had always been able to tell. “Little bit more. Keep easing it down until the grenade fire is bearable.”

Once he had it down, Kas broke the link. 

“Huh?” Angel asked.

“Let’s try it again.”

“But I had it!” 

“You can practice this, or you can practice throwing grenades,” Kas said. 

“Let’s practice this,” Angel agreed. 

Without a long history of failure behind him, Angel proved to be a quick study. By the time the rest of the platoon had taken their turns on the grenade range, he was managing his dials on his own. Kas praised him to the skies. 

The next few days went much the same way. Angel did a small but gradually increasing amount of whatever the platoon did. At least twice a day he tried to wriggle out of the very low standards Kas set for him, and at least twice a day Kas coaxed him into doing whatever it was. At every meal, Kas cajoled him into eating a few bites of his food. Each night, Kas tucked him into bed, and he didn’t sleep. 

Occasional brief meetings with Sergeant Macon confirmed that he viewed Angel’s performance as a near-miraculous improvement. Unfortunately, the way he chose to communicate this to Angel was to pull him out of the lineup after the physical fitness test and scream at him that he was the “Most improved private in the entire fucking platoon.”

It might have been all right if he had stopped then—Kas thought Angel would appreciate the sentiment, once he got past the volume at which it was delivered—but Macon went on to point out that that wasn’t saying much, since Angel was also the “most hopeless sack of shit he had ever seen.” When Angel started to cry, Macon backpedaled with a suggestion that Angel was now a _better_ sack of shit than he had been previously, but at that point, Angel was in no position to appreciate it.

After that, Macon went back to ignoring Angel, which Kas figured was probably for the best. To Kas’s mild surprised, the rest of the platoon ignored him, too. Angel’s behavior made the whole platoon look bad in front of the others, and he would have expected Angel to face some pretty heavy harassment, if not outright violence. But Macon’s attitude of benign neglect seemed to carry over to the trainees, and Kas could only be grateful for that.

When the rest of the platoon went off for field exercises, Kas and Macon agreed there was really no point in Angel going with them—he wasn’t ready to do anything other than get in the way, and there was more than enough to work on to keep Angel busy. Kas drew up a schedule, focusing on Angel’s worst areas: PT, managing his senses, and general military discipline. He designed their training activities to be challenging but bearable—which was exactly what Basic was _supposed_ to be. They ran and did calisthenics every day, visited the rifle range and other weapons ranges while other platoons were practicing so Angel could get used to the loud noises, and rehearsed drill commands and preparing for inspection. 

Kas arranged for them to observe other platoons in various phases of training, so Angel could ask Kas as many questions as he wanted while no one was expecting him to actually participate. Kas hoped that having gotten all of the questions and reassurances out of the way in advance, he’d be able to keep up with his platoon in the next training cycle, instead of stopping to discuss every little thing. Angel didn’t much mind observing, even when it came to the things he found most terrifying--firing on the rifle range and drill sargeantly yelling—but flew into a panic when Kas made some remark touching on the fact that Angel would be joining in these activities in the not-too-distant future. Kas made a point of introducing this idea as often as possible and walking him through how to calm himself down. 

Angel was still far from happy, but he wasn’t stressed beyond his ability to cope, and he began eating and sleeping a little better. By the time the rest of the platoon returned, Kas was fairly sure he would not look terribly out of place in a platoon of new recruits.

Unfortunately, he was now in the middle of a platoon of men who were only a few technical requirements short of being fully-qualified soldiers, and the difference was striking. Angel’s hard-won accomplishments, such as being able to stand up and face forward while the drill sergeant was addressing the platoon, and dropping to do a few pushups without crying about it, looked significantly less impressive in context.

Sergeant Macon refrained from commenting on Angel’s progress—wisely, in Kas’s opinion, since Angel still looked ready to cry if Macon addressed him specifically—but he gave Kas an approving nod or two, and Kas labored to convince Angel that this meant he was doing quite well, under the circumstances.

On Sundays, Angel went to Mass and then visited with the Catholic chaplain for a while, which Kas appreciated both because Angel seemed to enjoy it and because it gave him a couple Angel-free hours. The Sunday after the platoons return from field exercises, though, Macon called Kas into his office. After inviting Kas to sit down and offering him coffee, he sat back in his chair and looked at Kas for a long moment. Several times he seemed about to speak, but didn’t. 

Finally, Kas said, “Is there something wrong?”

Macon said, “When Temas gets recycled, that’s going to put him in a platoon under Sergeant Hixon.”

“And that’s…not good?” Macon wouldn’t be telling him, wouldn’t have planned to tell him this while Angel was busy and they’d have plenty of time to talk about it, if it was good.

“Hixon had him the first time. I don’t know what happened. I don’t wanna know,” he added quickly.

Kas shook his head. “I don’t know either. He doesn’t talk about it.” He felt sick. 

Macon took his time unwrapping a piece of gum and folding it into his mouth. When he was finished, he said, “The Army asked me to do this,” he said, with a glance around the office that took in the full scope of his responsibilities as drill sergeant. “When I got back from Vietnam. Said they could use more soldiers like me, so how about I train some.”

Kas nodded, not sure where Macon was going with this. 

“You have to be hard on them. That’s how you turn boys into soldiers.”

Kas nodded again.

“But some of the men who _ask_ for this job…maybe they like it a little too much. Know what I mean? Care more about breaking men than making soldiers.”

Kas’s stomach did a slow roll. “And Hixon’s one like that?”

“Can’t say. Don’t know the man all that well myself. Don’t want to. But I can tell you, he loses ‘bout twice as many recruits to section eight as any other DS. Your boy came damn near to being one of them. Would have been if he weren’t a Sentinel, I figure.”

Kas nodded. The Army had made considerable allowances for Angel, because he was a Sentinel…but those allowances wouldn’t have been necessary if he hadn’t been one, because he would never have been there in the first place. 

“The brass told me to go easy on him, and I did, best I knew how. Hixon won’t do that. Won’t care that your boy’s soft in the head, or whatever’s wrong with him.” Macon added another stick of gum to the first. “My sister has a boy’s soft in the head. I’d be god-damned before I’d let a man like Hixon get his hands on him.”

It would be both unwise and unnecessary to point out that Angel wasn’t soft in the head, at least not in the way Macon meant. Kas understood what Macon was carefully not saying—that he didn’t want to see Angel suffer, and that if this terrible chain of events unfolded, he would. Suffer. A lot. And he was telling Kas this in time for him to come up with some excuse, some reason or line of argument, that would stop it from happening.

“I’ll be getting another platoon the week after this one leaves,” Macon said. “The way I figure it, we have to fix it so your boy’s in that one.”

A ray of hope. “Yes,” Kas said, clutching at it. “How can we do that?”

“That’s what I don’t know. Tomorrow, I’m supposed to go to a meeting. Report to the training commander, liaison officer, that whole bunch, on how Private Temas is progressing. I can’t go in there and tell a room full of brass that one of their drill sergeants is a man I wouldn’t get to train a yeller dog, and that if they hand Temas over to him they might as well shoot him where he stands.” 

Kas nodded slowly. He certainly couldn’t tell them that, no. 

“We gotta work out something else to tell them,” Macon concluded. “And you have the look of a man who knows his way around brass.” 

Kas had a new appreciation for Sergeant Macon. He was a slow thinker, but he came to the right place in the end. And he knew his limits—coming up with a line of double-talk that would get them where they wanted to be, without saying any of the things he couldn’t say was beyond him. But he had a Sergeant’s genius for picking the right man for a job. “We do,” he agreed. “How about something like this….”

By the time Angel returned from church, they had a plan. Macon, worried that he wouldn’t be able to keep it all straight in a room full of brass, asked Kas to come along to the meeting. Kas was reminded of how he often reassured Angel that he would go with him when making him do something he didn’t want to do, but kept his mouth shut about that, as he figured Macon would not appreciate the comparison. The burden of their argument would be that Angel needed another week of remedial PT before he would be ready to keep up, and also that another week under relatively low-stress conditions would help him gain back some of the weight he had lost during his two training cycles. He was now below the official minimum weight for a recruit, which—although that requirement was regularly waived for female Sentinels—would provide an official reason for the delay. 

“It’s going to be one of those new mixed platoons,” Macon said suddenly. “Figure he’d like that. Grew up in a house full of women, didn’t he?”

Kas nodded. Angel’s grandfather had been around, but he didn’t have a father or brothers growing up, and his mother had had only sisters, and most of his cousins were girls. His high school had been mixed, and so had the marching band. Being thrust into an all-male environment was yet another of the shocks that basic training had imposed on him. “Yeah. Yeah, I think he’d like that.”

“Don’t know if we should say that. I ‘spect most of the recruits would ask to be in the mixed platoon, if they had their choice.” He shook his head. “Can’t imagine what the brass’re thinking. No idea how I’m supposed to train girls. But then, I have some practice now training a soldier who cries when you yell at ‘em.”

Kas nodded. Distracted, momentarily, from Angel’s problem, he wondered, “Are the girls going to be in the barracks with everybody else?” Maybe they would hang up a sheet or something. 

“No idea. That’s what I’ll be doing the week before I get ‘em, learning the Army regs for girls in Basic.” Macon shook his head. “My wife wouldn’t want me inspecting girls’ lockers. Checking if their unmentionables is folded right.”

“Well,” Kas said, “they’re soldiers. It’s not girls’ unmentionables, it’s soldiers’…unmentionables.” Macon seemed unconvinced, and he added, “Maybe you won’t have to do it.” That was a reassurance he never got to use on Angel.

They decided that Angel’s likely preference for training with girls would not be a persuasive argument, although Kas decided to keep it in reserve in case the whole plan went down in flames. 

“You think this is gonna work?” Macon asked as they wrapped up.

“I hope so.”

“If it don’t,” Macon said, “maybe Temas’ll have a training accident. Something that would lay him up for a week or so. He’s clumsy.”

Kas had already thought of that, and wouldn’t have risked saying it out loud, but nodded. “He is. Clumsy.” The difficult part would be calibrating the accident just right to put Angel out of commission for the week they needed. That, and figuring out whether to bring Angel in on the plan or not. Kas thought he would understand, or could be made to understand, but it would scare the hell out of him, and Kas wasn’t entirely sure he could be trusted not to tell anyone. 

While he was talking to Sergeant Macon, Kas felt like they had the situation pretty well under control, and that it would work out as they planned. But once he was back with Angel, he began to worry. Angel was in a good mood, fairly relaxed, and ate almost half of his dinner, while Kas poked disinterestedly at his. His stomach was clenched into a fist, and his mouth was too dry to swallow. Which was, he figured, probably how Angel felt most of the time. He forced his food down anyway. 

Back at the barracks, Angel climbed up onto his bunk with him and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Kas lied. If he and Sergeant Macon could get things fixed the way they wanted, there was no reason for Angel even to know about what might have happened instead. No reason to worry him.

“There’s something,” Angel insisted. 

Kas tried not to tell him, but his denials only made Angel more convinced that whatever was wrong must be really bad. Finally, he settled on an edited version of the truth. “It’s really no big thing. There’s a meeting tomorrow to talk about your next training cycle.”

Angel nodded solemnly. 

“I was talking to Sergeant Macon, and we thought we’d try to get you in his platoon again for next time.”

Angel considered this. “He isn’t as bad as the other one,” he admitted.

“Right. I know it’s hard to believe, but he does want you to do well. It’s his job to be mean.” They had discussed this before, and Angel was still unable to wrap his head around it, firmly believing that basic training would be better for everyone if the drill sergeants were nice, “like you, Kas.” 

“He’s never going to say it, but he sort of likes you a little bit,” Kas added, not mentioning that it was because Angel reminded him of his slow nephew. “He’s doing you a favor, trying to get you in his platoon again. He thinks—we both think—that’s going to be the best thing for you. So I’m a little worried about whether it’s going to work out.” 

Angel chewed his lip. “And we find out tomorrow?”

“Maybe. The meeting’s tomorrow. Sergeant Macon and I will explain why we want to do it that way, and—well, I’m not entirely sure whose decision it is. They might want some more time to think about it.” Kas hoped they decided then. He didn’t need a few more days of this kind of anxiety. “But it should go the way we want it to. The only thing is that there’s a week between when this platoon leaves and his new one starts, and there’s another platoon starting right away. So they’ll probably want to put you in that one, and we have to convince them it’s worthwhile to keep you waiting around for a week.”

Angel looked hopeful. “Maybe I could go home. In between.”

In a way, Kas was relieved that Angel was so clearly insensible of the danger he was in. “I don’t think so. What we’re going to say is that you need some more time to practice the things we’ve been working on. So you’re going to have to stay here and work.”

“Like last week?”

“Yes, just like last week.” 

“That wasn’t so bad. Okay. We should do that.”

“That’s what I think, but we don’t get to decide,” Kas reminded him. Angel still seemed to have trouble with the idea that in the Army everyone had rules to follow. 

Reassured, Angel settled down to write to his mother, the other thing he usually did on Sundays. That night, it was Kas who lay awake for most of the night, dreading what the morning would bring.

The meeting had been scheduled for while the platoon was doing written tests, so Kas left Angel with a reminder to stay calm and focus on answering the questions that he did know. 

The meeting included the training commander, a Sentinel Recruitment Board liaison officer, and Dr. Whitmore, the Sentinel medicine specialist. Macon went through the explanation that Kas had coached him on, that he had asked Kas to join the meeting because he could answer questions about the details of Temas’s progress. 

Whitmore and the commander accepted this readily; the SRB liaison looked dissatisfied, but said nothing. 

The liaison started off the meeting bluntly. “Will Sentinel Temas be graduating with his platoon, Sergeant?”

“No, sir, but--”

“It was my understanding that the purpose of providing him with a Guide was to ensure that he would successfully complete his training.”

“Well, sir, he’s done real well the last couple weeks, but he was in pretty bad shape when I got him. Worse than when he got here in the first place, if you look at my report. It’s my recommendation that he be recycled. He should be able to pass next time.”

The commander was nodding. “I read your report, Sergeant. He’s made satisfactory progress. We’ll recycle him into Sergeant Hixon’s platoon starting--”

Dr. Whitmore slammed his hand down on the table. “Wait just one god-damn minute. That psychopath damn near killed the boy last time. Section him, or pass him through if you’re that desperate for another Sentinel, but don’t give the bastard another crack at him.”

Before Kas had time to digest this unexpected support for their position, the liaison officer said, “Doctor, Sergeant Hixon did not try to kill Sentinel Temas. If the Guide provides adequate supervision, there should be no repeat of the previous incident.”

“The ‘incident’ would never have happened if Hixon hadn’t tortured him for weeks on end. Temas wasn’t that fragile when he got here, but he’s a section eight now, if I ever saw one. If you keep him, you’ll be sending him out of here in a body bag.”

“Recycle him,” the liaison officer said. “We can’t afford to give up on a Sentinel when there’s a chance he might shape up. You said he’s improved,” he added to Macon, “didn’t you, Sergeant?”

“He has, sir, but--”

Whitmore didn’t let him finish. “You think he’ll keep improving if you put him right back in the situation that fucked him up in the first place?”

Kas had begun to hope that maybe the officers would stumble over the obvious solution on their own, without any need for Sergeants sticking their heads up, but it didn’t look like they were going to. And Macon was too cowed by the room full of rank to speak unless spoken to.

That meant it fell to Kas, and even though Whitmore had smacked him down for talking out of turn before, he was clearly the best ally they had. “Captain Whitmore, sir,” he said.

Whitmore looked at him. “You have something to add?”

“Yes, sir. Sergeant Macon and I…concur with your assessment that my Sentinel is…unlikely to thrive under Sergeant Hixon’s style of leadership.” That was, he hoped, a suitably diplomatic rephrasing to keep the liaison officer from jumping down this throat, while at the same time signaling to Whitmore that they were on exactly the same page. 

“But you do want to recycle him,” Whitmore said, speaking to Macon.

“Yes, sir,” Macon said. “Into my platoon starting week after next.” Reverting to the planned script, he explained, “He could use another week of individual instruction, anyhow. I thought I’d write up a training plan and have Sergeant Dillinger keep working on him. And he’s still off his feed. Not sleeping and all. Be good to build him up some before he starts over with the new platoon. And I got a handle on how to work with him, now. I can get him at least within spitting distance of passing, if he keeps on going like he has been.”

The commander asked the liaison officer, “Would that satisfy you?”

“I suppose,” he said.

“And you?” he asked Whitmore.

Whitmore looked hard at Kas. “Guide Dillinger, is it your opinion that this plan is in your Sentinel’s best interest?”

Kas considered the question carefully. “I think that he would _prefer_ to be sectioned,” he said.

“Not happening,” said the liaison officer.

“But he’s in no way ready to be passed. I’m not sure how many of the specific skills he hasn’t learned yet will be relevant to his future MOS, but he will need to cope with psychological stress, and to take orders and do things that he doesn’t necessarily want to do. He’s improved significantly in those areas, but he has quite a way to go.”

“What _is_ his future MOS?” Dr. Whitmore asked. “You can’t be thinking about sending him into combat,” he added, looking at the liaison officer.

The liaison officer gritted his teeth and said, “Medical school. We were _hoping_ for a combat medic.”

Whitmore and Macon were both looking gobsmacked. “He has the grades for it,” Kas said. “But he can’t learn when he’s terrified.”

“If that’s the case, he won’t survive med school, either,” Whitmore pointed out. 

Kas nodded. “It’s my thinking that successfully completing basic training will go a long way to building his confidence.”

Macon chimed in, “That’s what Basic is for, if you’re doing it right. Teaching these kids they can do more than they think they can. Passing him through now would be as good as saying he can’t hack it.” 

“But can he, is the question,” Whitmore said. “Guide Dillinger, your _orders_ are to see Sentinel Temas through basic training. Your _duty_ is to his best interests.”

“No it isn’t,” the liaison officer said. 

Whitmore ignored him. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir,” Kas said. 

“Is what you’re suggesting in his best interest?”

If Kas said no, Whitmore would continue to press for Angel to be given a section eight discharge. There was a chance he’d go home. But he’d be going home a broken man—not the innocent kid he must have been when he first showed up, and not the warrior the Army had been trying to create. Kas couldn’t see a future for him in that. “Yes. It is.”

Whitmore nodded slowly. “All right. Then I’ll agree to it.”

With everyone in agreement, they hashed out a plan to make sure Angel would be adequately supported. Kas would stay with him, and he’d continue having weekly counseling sessions with the chaplain.

“And I want to see him every week, too,” Whitmore added.

“You already lost that one,” the liaison officer pointed out. 

“And if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have needed a _Guide_ to tell me he was having an allergic reaction to his uniform socks,” Whitmore shot back. “If I had been doing it from the beginning, he wouldn’t be in the state he’s in. Weekly check-ups to monitor his weight and psychological fitness.”

“Weekly reports from the Guide,” the liaison officer countered. “Would be less disruptive to his training.”

“The Guide is not a medical doctor,” said Whitmore. “I want to see him with my own eyes.”

“Wouldn’t disrupt his training much if you do it on Sundays, sir,” Macon suggested. 

The training commander approved that plan. The liaison officer’s next suggestion was, “Sentinel Temas should undergo end-of-cycle testing with the rest of his platoon this week.”

“He won’t pass, sir,” Macon pointed out. “He would be better off spending the time training.”

More than anything, Kas was convinced that the liaison officer just wanted to win one, more concerned about pissing on territory than Angel’s welfare. Unfortunately, the training commander decided to throw him a bone. Angel would attempt all of the end-of-cycle tests, no matter how unprepared for them he was. 

Kas wasn’t happy about that—Angel’s performance would be abysmal, and Kas was sure that would do a number on his confidence—but they had won the most important concessions that they had come in asking for. He would just have to convince Angel that taking a practice run on the tests would help him be ready to pass them next time. Hell, it might even be true. 

After the meeting was dismissed and Kas stood up, Whitmore said, “I want a word with you, Guide.”

Kas waited with some trepidation. Whitmore appeared to be firmly in Angel’s camp, but Kas had learned to be wary of people who barked “Guide” at him. 

Once everyone else had left, Whitmore asked him, “Did anyone explain to you what happened to Sentinel Temas before you were here?”

“No, sir.” He cravenly hoped Whitmore wasn’t about to.

“He tried to kill himself. Got up in the middle of the night and swallowed a bottle of pain pills that had been prescribed to another recruit. When he didn’t get up the next morning, Hixon apparently had the rest of the platoon try to wake him up by beating the shit out of him. I doubt it was the first time. Then when we finally got him to the infirmary and pumped his stomach, and Sergeant Hixon got wind of it, he demanded I give Temas back to him so he could discipline him for stealing.”

“Christ,” Kas swore. He had known Angel was unhappy, but he hadn’t realized he was suicidal—and that really was something he ought to have been told. 

Whitmore nodded. “Hixon had the other boy—the one whose pills Temas took—running up and down the stairs all night. The pills were for a broken foot, by the way. That’s what Hixon is like. No sense of decency. Like he doesn’t even realize there’s a line he shouldn’t cross.”

It was much the same thing as Macon had said, although couched in more educated language. “Then I’m glad Angel won’t have to deal with him again.” It sounded to Kas like any trainees should be dealing with Hixon, but it wasn’t his place to comment on who the Army chose to make a drill sergeant. 

“Keep a close eye on your Sentinel. If anything happens to him….”

It would be on Kas’s head. “Yes, sir.”

The rest of the week was predictably harrowing. The last week of Basic was usually a smooth downhill slide, full of getting measured for dress uniforms and making plans for the upcoming leave. By that point, morning PT was a walk in the park, and the final tests were practically a game. For Angel, they were a dispiriting demonstration of exactly how far he had yet to go. 

Since they had been concentrating on PT, the final fitness test wasn’t too bad. Angel wasn’t too far off of passing, and he could look back at the progress he’d made and see that if he kept progressing as he had, he’d be ready. The obstacle course was brutal. Angel hadn’t even been near it before, and each of the obstacles was supervised by a different training instructor, all of whom yelled. Angel’s performance consisted mostly of falling off of obstacles, and he finished up shaking and crying, with a score of zero percent. 

The rifle range was another low point. Angel was terrified of his rifle—carrying it, loading it, acknowledging its existence in any way. For the test, he was issued forty rounds, and Sergeant Macon told him that by God he was going to fire every god-damned one of them. 

Kas, now that he knew Macon was on Angel’s side, was able to appreciate that this was not as cruel as it seemed—that Macon was, in fact, attempting to communicate that no one was expecting Angel to actually hit anything; all he had to do was fire the rounds he’d been issued, anywhere, and that Macon would consider that enough of an accomplishment for one day. Angel, however, was too hysterical at the prospect to appreciate this. 

“Sweetheart, it’s okay,” Kas said patiently, taking Angel’s rifle and loading it, while wondering exactly when calling his Sentinel “sweetheart” had come to seem normal. “Just point it that way and pull the trigger. How are your dials?” 

Angel shook his head. 

“Here.” He tried to hand Angel the rifle. Angel shook his head again. “I need a free hand to link with you,” Kas explained, taking Angel’s hands and wrapping them around the rifle. “Here, just hold it, okay?” Only now Angel’s hands were full. After taking a quick glance around to make sure there were no liaison officers in sight, he put his hand on the back of Angel’s neck and linked with him. Slowly easing Angel’s dial down, he asked, “How’s that?”

Angel gulped and nodded. “Don’t go away!” he yelped when Kas moved to break the link.

“Okay,” Kas soothed him. “Not going anywhere. Do you remember how to hold your rifle?”

Angel didn’t, of course, and with only one free hand, Kas had a hard time showing him how to do it. Eventually, though, Kas got him facing the right way with his finger in the trigger guard and the butt of the rifle braced against his shoulder. He really wished they had practiced this. “Okay, I’ve got you,” Kas reassured him. 

When Angel fired, the recoil sent him stumbling back into Kas. He whimpered.

“You’re okay,” Kas told him. “That happens. This time, I’m going to put my hand here….”

Kas had him try all three shooting positions. It turned out Angel didn’t mind prone so much—which made sense, since when he tended to hit the ground anyway when he was upset. Kas let him fire most of his rounds prone. 

His final score was, of course, zero, but Kas told him, “You did great, sweetheart.” They happened to be standing near where the trainees who actually _had_ done well were lining up to get marksmanship badges, and Kas could only imagine what they were thinking. Kas had earned one of those badges himself. He had thrived in Basic. He knew that Guides weren’t taken very seriously in the Army, were condescended to and made allowances for; this knowledge had made him determined to ace everything. When people said he wasn’t really like a Guide, he’d thought that was a compliment. A Sentinel’s weak point was his Guide, and Kas wasn’t going to be anybody’s weakness.

Back then, he’d have been horrified by his current duty, as something between a baby sitter and a security blanket. In a way, he still was, whenever he took notice of what the other soldiers must think of him. It was sickening, after everything he’d done to make sure he was a real soldier, to be reduced to petting and cuddling this frankly pathetic excuse for a Sentinel. The thought of how, “You did great, sweetheart,” must sound to the others turned his stomach.

But then Angel would hug him and say, “Thanks, Kas. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here” and Kas would hug him back and agree. Angel, it couldn’t be denied, needed him. This was not exactly the kind of challenge he had hoped he would face in his first assignment as an Army Ranger, but it was undeniably a challenge. If he thought about it at just the right angle, he could be proud of the job he was doing here. It was a job two drill sergeants had failed miserably at, and he was sure it wasn’t something just any Guide could have done. 

And Angel was, it was equally undeniable, a sweetheart. It certainly helped that he accepted Kas’s competence with none of the unflattering surprise that other Sentinels displayed, but even leaving that aside, Kas liked him in a way he hadn’t liked any of the other Sentinels he’d been assigned to. He was, when it came down to it, a nice kid. As Guide, it was supposed to be more important that he respect his Sentinel than like him, but even so, Kas was coming around to respecting Angel, in a way, as he faced his fears. Whatever Guide ended up with him after Sentinel School would be glad to have him, Kas was sure.

Finally, the rest of the platoon graduated. Kas and Angel watched from the sidelines as they marched and drilled, and were congratulated by Sergeant Macon and the training commander. They were dismissed on a six-hour pass to celebrate. 

Kas took Angel back to the barracks and told him it was time to get serious about learning to strip and clean his rifle. 

Over the next week, Kas focused on improving Angel’s familiarity with his rifle, getting him to eat and sleep almost normally, and preparing him emotionally that when his real training started up again, he was going to be expected to keep up with the others. Angel didn’t cry when Kas told him this, which made Kas wonder if he didn’t quite believe it was true. Still, getting as upset as Kas had expected him to about it would interfere with goal two, eating and sleeping, so Kas refrained from attempting to drive the point home. 

The week ended, and Angel gleefully returned his rifle to the armory, where he wouldn’t have to see it again until his new platoon was issued them in week three. Kas had him pack up his duffle, so he wouldn’t stand out any more than he had to, and marched him down to where the rest of the platoon was getting off the bus and forming up into a straggly line, looking around themselves with expressions of either terror or studied nonchalance. The nonchalant ones, Kas noticed, betrayed themselves by having no idea what to do with their hands. 

Sergeant Macon bellowed at them to line up in order of height, with their duffle bags on their left sides. Angel quickly identified which of the trainees were shorter than he was—two of the girls—and lined up, putting his duffle bag exactly where it was supposed to be. Several of the new arrivals had trouble following these simple instructions—some were out of order, two men got into an argument over which of them was taller, and quite a few put their duffle bags on their right sides, or directly in front of them, or stood grasping them anxiously in their hands. These were promptly dropped for pushups. Several of the nonchalant ones now looked anxious, and the formerly terrified ones looked like they were about to cry, including many of the men. 

“Too slow!” Macon screamed. “Back on the bus!”

The trainees looked confused. 

“Now!” Macon bellowed again, and the trainees started to scurry. 

Kas, well familiar with this game, shepherded Angel onto the bus and found him a seat, then stood in the aisle next to him. Angel’s seatmate, one of the girls, looked up at him. “Sir? Are they taking us somewhere else?”

“Just wait,” Kas advised her. 

They were ordered on and off the bus two more times before everyone managed to line up to Sergeant Macon’s satisfaction, and he started in on the traditional welcoming speech—the one that started with “So, you want to be in my Army,” and went on to detail the reasons the trainees in front of him would surely never achieve that goal. The girl next to Angel started to cry. Macon zeroed in on her. “Do you want to go home, little girl?” he demanded.   
“No, sir,” the girl sniffled.

“Don’t call me sir! I work for a living! You will address me as Drill Sergeant. Do you want to go home to your momma?”

“No, Drill Sergeant,” she said. 

“I can’t hear you!”

Things went on in this vein for some time. By the end of it, Angel was decidedly shaky, but not actually crying. In fact, he looked better than most of the others. 

Outside the barracks, Macon sorted the recruits into squads and appointed squad leaders. Squad four was all of the girls and Angel. Kas could see Macon wavering between Angel and a tall Black girl with military bearing for squad leader; he was relieved when Macon chose the girl. One of the boys made the mistake of smirking at this. “Do you think Private Temas is lucky, Private Douglas?” Macon screamed. 

Douglas sang out, “No, Drill Sergeant!”

“You don’t think Private Temas is lucky? Why, don’t you like girls, Private Douglas?”

A flash of panic went across Douglas’s face before he yelled back, “No, Drill Sergeant! Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“You don’t like girls?”

“I do like girls, Drill Sergeant!”

“Then is Private Temas lucky, Private Douglas?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“If any of you ladies,” Macon addressed the rest of the platoon, “want to get lucky like Private Temas, all you have to do is be as much of a pussy as Private Temas!”

All in all, Kas thought this was fairly well done. Angel was among the few trainees who had not yet been screamed at—the others were all ones who had behaved flawlessly so far, the ones who almost certainly came from military families and had been coached on what to expect. Now Angel _still_ hadn’t been screamed at, but the rest of the platoon would be left with the impression that he had come in for his fair share of abuse. Angel had come far enough now that he only gave Kas an anxious look. Kas gave his hand a reassuring squeeze, and he nodded hesitantly, seeming to grasp that Kas would explain later. 

Once that was finished, Macon yelled, “When ordered, you will march up those stairs to bay two. Males will proceed into bay two and place your gear on your bunks. Females will proceed to the bay two lounge! Females will wait in the bay two lounge to be escorted to the female bay by a female drill instructor! Private Temas!”

Angel remembered his line, or most of it, anyway. “Private Temas, reports as ordered.” When Kas poked him in the back, he added, “Drill Sergeant.”

“Private Temas, after you have placed your gear on your bunk you will proceed to the bay two lounge and demonstrate to your squad mates how to make a military bunk!”

Angel paled slightly at this news, but answered, “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

That was yet another of Macon’s good ideas. Teaching new recruits to make their bunks and stow their gear always involved a lot of yelling, throwing things, and dropping people for pushups, and now Angel would be out of the room for most of it. 

The lounge was a room just outside the bay. It was called that even though no trainee in living memory had ever lounged in it. Now there was a bunk and locker set up in it, apparently put there for this demonstration. By the time they got there, the tall girl had the rest of the squad lined up in formation. 

Angel looked up at Kas pleadingly. 

“You know how to do this,” Kas said. “Just show them like I showed you.”

“Okay,” Angel said doubtfully. He turned to his squadmates and said, “Okay,” again. “Uh, I guess the first thing you should know is that you’re supposed to call this your bunk. They don’t like it if you call it a bed. Or a rack. That’s the Marines or something.”

The tall girl was looking exasperated now. Yes, definitely a very good thing Angel hadn’t been made squad leader. She’d eat him for breakfast. 

Angel, apparently having taken Kas’s instruction to “show them like I showed you,” literally, said, “Um, okay, who wants to try it first?”

No one volunteered. Kas rescued him. “Private….” He looked at the tall girl.

“Holgate, Sergeant!” she yelled.

“You don’t have to yell,” Kas said. “I have excellent hearing; it’s the drill sergeants who are all deaf.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” she said in a more normal tone of voice.

“I bet your father told you the first rule of basic training is ‘never volunteer for anything.’ Is that right?”

“My mother, Sergeant.”

“Right. You just volunteered.”

Angel’s explanation of how to make the bed was thorough, perhaps excessively so, and it helped that Holgate obviously already knew how to do it. After she had done it, they stripped the bunk and had several others try. At one point Sergeant Macon stuck his head in, but he just nodded to Kas and withdrew without saying anything, so Kas supposed they were doing all right. When Macon went back into the bay, a new torrent of yelling made Angel flinch. Kas patted his shoulder. 

By the time a woman with sergeant’s stripes—but not, Kas noted, a drill instructor’s hat—showed up to take the rest of the squad away, most of the girls had had a turn making the bunk, and the worst of the storm seemed to have died down back in the bay. Angel was able to get his bunk made and his gear stowed without incident.

They formed up again outside. “As you may have noticed!” Sergeant Macon bellowed, “The Army has instituted Gender Integrated Basic Training in this platoon! There will be no hanky! There will be no panky! Am I understood, platoon?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant,” the platoon chorused raggedly. 

“There will be no females in the male barracks or the male latrines. There will be no males in the female barracks or the female latrines. Am I understood, platoon?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“There will be no courting in my platoon! There will be no spooning! There will be no kissy-face! There will be no holding hands! Except for Private Temas and Sergeant Dillinger.”

Kas coughed. Standing behind Angel, out of the trainees’ line of sight, he waved and mouthed, “Sorry!”

“Am I understood, platoon?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

They marched off to the medical clinic where, to everyone’s relief, the girls were herded off by the woman sergeant again before everyone had to strip off. After everyone had turned their heads and coughed, and had their chests listened to, they faced a line of nurses with needles. One of the trainees said that he’d had all of his shots before he left home, and was told it wouldn’t hurt him to have them twice.

As the first nurse was wiping Angel’s arm with an alcohol pad, he asked, “Does it hurt you to have them four times?”

“Excuse me?”

“I had all the shots before I left home, and then twice more here,” Angel explained. 

“Stand over there.”

After the nurse had finished injecting the rest of the platoon, she and a doctor had a hurried conference on the other side of the room. Watching this, Angel said, “I guess it’s a good thing I said something.”

“Hm?”

“The doctor just said I shouldn’t have had them the third time, especially since I’m a Sentinel.” He frowned. “Now the nurse is getting in trouble. She wasn’t the one who gave me the shots last time. Should I go tell him that?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Didn’t you say anything last time they gave you the shots?”

“No. I was scared to.”

And now he wasn’t, apparently. Another sign of progress. More than that, Angel was starting to get a handle on the concept of when he should speak up and when he should keep his mouth shut. The concept still needed some refinement, but he was on the right track.

Later, they marched back to the barracks to stencil their names on their newly-issued gear. Squads one, two, and three did this in the barracks bay, while squad four was in the lounge. Apparently, the “no males in the female barracks” rule applied to Drill Sergeants as well, and the work-around was to have the girls do their barracks chores in the lounge, where Sergeant Macon could keep an eye on them and, not incidentally, Angel could work with the rest of his squad. 

Angel hadn’t been issued anything new, so he asked Kas, “What do you want me to do?”

Kas looked around the room. Most of the trainees had settled down to the task, but the girl who had been standing next to Angel in line, who did not want to go home to her momma, was just clutching her unopened duffle and looking shell-shocked. “Why don’t you see if you can help her get started,” he suggested. 

He looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”

Kas took up a position near the door, keeping an eye on Angel but giving him some space. Private Holgate, who had also chosen a spot near the door, kept stealing glances up at him. 

He had better find out what she wanted. Deciding to ease into it, he said, “So your mother was Army?”

Holgate nodded. “She was a nurse in Korea.”

He nodded. “Are you going to be a nurse, too?” If she was headed for the Army medical school, Angel would know somebody there.

“No. Infantry support.”

“Oh.”

“My daddy was a Ranger. He was KIA in Vietnam. I want to be one, too.” 

She looked up at Kas with an expression that suggested she expected ridicule, but Kas just nodded. 

“They don’t take women,” she added. 

“Not long ago, they didn’t take Guides, either.”

“And you’re…really a Ranger?”

That was something of a tricky question. “I was attached to a Ranger unit for two years, and I just finished Ranger School.”

“What are you doing _here_?”

That was a question he had to be careful how he answered. If Angel wasn’t just across the room, where he could hear anything Kas was saying if he chose to listen, he might have shared his suspicions that he had been given this assignment largely because it was embarrassing. If Holgate did succeed in becoming the first female Ranger, she would doubtless face similar challenges. But as it was, he just said, “Doing what the Army ordered me to do.”

When he met up with Angel again, he gave no sign that he had heard any of Kas’s conversation with Holgate, which had to be for the best. He didn’t relish the idea of trying to explain that what he was doing now was not exactly what he would have personally chosen, nor did he think Angel would much like hearing about the sort of work Kas expected to be doing after they parted. 

The next few weeks went…well. Angel had a considerable head start over most of the platoon, and for the first few days, he was among the best in the group. Many of the others improved very rapidly once they got oriented, pushing Angel back to the middle of the pack, but really, he was not particularly conspicuous, apart from having a Guide following him around everywhere he went. Kas coached him to ask for a link when he wanted reassurance—very few of his difficulties were actually Sentinel issues, but that at least looked more dignified than clinging to Kas and crying. He didn’t quite manage the imperious tone that most Sentinels used to summon their Guides, but then again, Kas didn’t try very hard to teach him that, either. 

It helped that in this group, Angel knew he wasn’t the only one who was nervous and homesick. Kas was fairly sure that he hadn’t been the only one in either of his other two platoons, either, but the girls were willing to openly discuss the topic. Exactly how scared they had been during particular exercises was a perennial topic of conversation in the lounge, along with “why are drill sergeants so mean?”

One of the trainees, Olivia, embarrassed herself by blushing tomato-red every time she heard someone swear. In week three, when their rifles were issued, the rest of the squad undertook to help her break this habit, and when they were learning to strip and clean them, the lounge rang with cries of, “Where’s the damn gun oil?” and “Hand me that fucking bottle brush.” Angel was briefly scandalized by the notion of using rough language in front of women, but quickly entered into the spirit of the thing. Around the same time, he also acquired the decency to be embarrassed by “sweetheart” and asked Kas not to call him that, “At least in front of the guys.”

The guys, Kas understood, primarily meant his squad. On one occasion when the girls were discussing which form of address they liked the least, “females” or “ladies,” Angel pointed out, “Last time, there weren’t any girls and he still said ladies. He says ‘ladies and gentlemen’ now, so you must be the gentlemen.” The girls found this hilarious, and in short order squad four was known in the platoon as “The Gentlemen.” The other squads, not to be outdone, gave themselves names like, “Cowboys” and “Knights in Shining Armor,” but the girls were not particularly impressed. 

Angel was accepted seamlessly by most of the squad, and was treated by Holgate with the same tolerance she showed the rest of them, who she clearly thought were a bunch of pansies. She asked several times to be transferred to one of the other squads; when Sergeant Macon refused, Kas calmed her outrage by pointing out that the rest of the squad needed her leadership. He was, by that point, squad four’s private instructor and big brother figure. It had started when the other trainees began listening in when Kas explained things in great detail to Angel, and now they were coming to him with their questions, too. Sergeant Macon largely left him to it, except for when the entire platoon was in formation. Kas was fairly sure he wasn’t really supposed to be doing that, but didn’t particularly mind, since Angel-wrangling was a less time-consuming job than it had been.

The evening before they were to take their rifles to the firing range for the first time, when they were in the lounge once again stripping and cleaning the rifles, Olivia asked, “Why do we have to learn to use guns, anyway? I’m going to be a nurse. I better not have to shoot anybody.”

“Rifles,” Susan corrected her. Apart from Private Holgate, squad four was in the habit of using first names among themselves.

“ _Fucking_ rifles,” Pauline added helpfully. 

Olivia’s ears went slightly pink as she obligingly repeated, “Why do we have to learn these fucking rifles?”

Kas had been over that one many times before with Angel, so he just said, “Angel?”

“Um, okay…because, if we get assigned near a combat zone, everyone will be carrying weapons around, and if we know how they work and how to use them, we’ll be more comfortable having them around. And…” He hesitated. “And Kas said, there’s always a chance—not likely, but there’s a chance—that a medical unit or aid station or whatever could be attacked, and then we might have to—well, you know, we’d have to help defend our patients.” 

The several girls who were planning to be nurses didn’t look any happier about that idea than Angel did, so Kas added, “That’s not something that happens often, at all, but if it did, you’d be glad you knew what to do. Also,” he changed the subject quickly, “people don’t always stay in the same job they started out in, so it’s more efficient to have basic training be the same for everybody. You might even like shooting, once you try. Lots of people think it’s fun.”

“I guess,” Olivia said. “As long as we don’t have to shoot _people_.”

“If you ever have to shoot people, it’ll be because they’re shooting at you first.” 

It was not, perhaps, the most reassuring thing he could have said, and the room got quiet for a minute, until Susan said, “My brother said at his basic, they had to give their rifles girls’ names. At least we didn’t have to do that.”

“It would probably be boys’ names, for us,” Nancy pointed out practically.

“Except Angel,” said Olivia. 

“I would call mine…” Angel hefted his rifle. Kas prayed that he wasn’t about to say, “Kas.” “Angelita.”

That was, Kas supposed, slightly better. 

“I’ll call mine Prince,” Karen decided. “That was our dog when I was growing up. He was really nice with us kids, but he was a great watchdog.”

Several of the others thought that was a good idea, and gave their rifles dogs’ names, too. Olivia announced that she liked horses better, and hers would be “Black Beauty.” They all thought that was hilarious until Sergeant Macon came in to yell about all the girlish giggling and made them do push-ups. 

They were more serious on the range the next day. The training day seemed planned to build suspense and not to get the thing they were all worried about over with quickly. First they stood in formation and recited rifle safety rules, then ran through drill commands for a while. Angel was so nervous that he got right and left mixed up, for the first time in weeks. When they practiced clearing the rifles and taking the safety catches on and off, Angel dropped his three times. Sergeant Macon only made him do push-ups for one of them. 

Next they took turns dry-firing. By this point Angel was actually vibrating with tension. “This is easy,” Kas soothed him. “You don’t even have any ammo yet.”

“I will soon,” Angel pointed out shakily. He snaked his arm around Kas and pressed in close. 

“But not now. Get in the foxhole.” He shifted his grip to Angel’s hand.

“Any time, Temas,” Macon yelled from where he was assisting another trainee. 

Angel climbed reluctantly into the foxhole. Kas was glad he was taking his turn at the end of his squad, the way he was carrying on. After he had dry-fired in all three positions and gotten back in formation, Sergeant Macon yelled, “Now, boys and girls, the Army says I have to feed you every day, so we’re having a picnic! Squad leaders, report!”

Each squad leader was issued a case of C-rats to distribute. Angel was given one labeled, “Meat Chunks with Beans in Tomato Sauce.” That was the last one in the case; Holgate looked at him and shrugged. Kas nodded and waved her away. He wasn’t sure if this had been arranged on purpose or not—since they weren’t used to Guides in Basic, it could be a genuine oversight. Still, he might as well take the opportunity to show Angel the right answer.

After looking in dismay at his lunch for a moment, Angel noticed he didn’t have one. “Here, you can have mine,” he said generously. “I’m not very hungry anyway.”

“Thanks,” Kas said. “They do this in advanced training after Sentinel School. Maybe not in yours, but in OCS, they do. To see if you take care of your Guide.” Which was patronizing as all hell, but once Angel was out in the world, if he didn’t stick up for his Guide, nobody else would, so as much as Kas would prefer to take care of himself, he had better make sure Angel had this learning experience.

“What am I supposed to do?” Angel asked.

“The most-right answer is to find out from whoever’s in charge if there’s more rations anywhere. If there isn’t, then you should share with me.” 

Angel looked over at Sergeant Macon. “Can’t you just go ask him?”

“You’re the Sentinel; it’s your job.” If this was a training exercise, sending Kas off to do it would definitely be the wrong answer. “You could tell me to, but it would look bad.”

“Do I have to?”

“It’s up to you.” Kas was still eating anywhere from a third to half of Angel’s food at every meal, on top of his own. He had gained back most of the weight he lost during Ranger School; having one short lunch wasn’t going to do him any harm. 

Angel hesitated. Everybody else was eating; Kas shook his head and started opening the cans. They weren’t really going to have time to dither over this. “Here, eat the cake; that part’s actually good.” Kas polished off the meat chunks—even on a good day, Angel wasn’t going to force that down, and this wasn’t a good day—and they split the crackers and fake cheese. Sergeant Macon walked by and glared a couple of times, but didn’t say anything, which was good because Kas thought Angel might throw up if he did.

Finally, squad one was issued their rounds, and Kas got to work on Angel’s senses. He had been getting pretty good with his dials, but now that he was upset they were completely fucked—hearing and eyesight dialed up and spiking every few minutes, taste and touch muffled to nothing, with the occasional spike to keep things interesting. When his sense of touch spiked, Angel would suddenly squirm backwards like he was having a seizure, usually dropping his rifle in the process. 

“It’s all right,” Kas soothed him. “Focus on the hearing dial, keep it steady.” While Angel was busy with that, Kas nudged the touch dial up enough that he could keep his hands on his rifle. “That’s it, sweetheart, you’re getting it. Just like we practiced before.”

Suddenly, Angel’s eyesight spiked and all of his other senses flattened. He was staring vacantly toward the horizon, where a flock of geese was flying by. 

It was the first time Kas had ever had a Sentinel zone while linked up. It was a decidedly weird sensation; he felt disconnected from both his own body and Angel’s, like they were reduced to a floating eyeball. 

Very weird. Once Kas managed to sort himself out, he started the usual line of patter—“Listen to my voice, Angel, follow me back--” and rubbed Angel’s back through his jacket. When Angel came back, he immediately fell to his knees and gagged. 

“Is he okay?” one of the girls asked.

“No,” Kas answered tersely. After he had finished throwing up, Kas quickly kicked some dirt over it and hustled him as far away as they could get, then sat Angel down between his knees with his back against Kas’s chest, and offered him a canteen to rinse his mouth out. 

Angel huddled against him, shaking and sniffling, for some time. When he settled down enough for Kas to take notice of anything else that was going on around them, the girls from the squad had formed up around them, preventing the boys from the other squads from gawking. 

After a few minutes more, Angel sat up a little and took some deep breaths. “You okay?” Kas asked him.

Angel sniffed and nodded. “Better.”

“All right. Stay calm, and let’s check your dials again.”

By the time it was squad four’s turn on the range, Angel was settled enough to get up and watch. 

When the rest of them had had their turns, Macon came over and asked, “Is he well enough to shoot, Sergeant?”

Kas wasn’t sure. “I think so. You ready to try, sweet—Ang?” 

“Do I have to?”

“I think you should. You know how it is; the anticipation is worse than actually doing it. You might as well get it over with.”

“How many do I have to do?”

Sergeant Macon didn’t answer, so Kas said, “One shot from each firing position, if you can manage it.”

“Okay. I’ll try.”

“Good.”

Angel was issued three rounds, and he fired them. None of them came even close to hitting the targets—and in fact, Angel didn’t seem to notice or care where they ended up—but he fired them. Kas thought that he probably should have said six shots, or maybe even nine—now that Angel had started, he didn’t seem to be doing too badly. But after Angel’s third shot, he shoved the rifle at Kas and collapsed against him for a hug, so Kas decided not to push things. 

When they were back in the lounge, the girls seemed shy of Angel, as if they weren’t quite sure what to make of him now. 

“That wasn’t so bad, really,” Nancy said as they settled down to clean their weapons.

Several others agreed, Olivia speaking up, “I thought it was fun.” 

Angel just edged closer to Kas and shivered. 

“We weren’t sure what we should do,” Holgate said to Kas. “When Angel was…wasn’t well. Apart from keep the others from bothering him.”

“That was the right thing to do,” Kas assured her. “If your unit’s Sentinel is in sensory distress, and a Guide’s there, all you really have to do is secure the area as best you can and let the Guide handle it. Of course, that’s harder in some circumstances than others--” Namely in combat, which he wasn’t going to refer to any more directly than that while Angel was feeling so fragile. “—so in a real-life situation, you’d want to balance the mission objectives and the safety of the rest of the unit with that. As squad leader, you’d be the one making that call,” he added. “And actually, it could come up in the field exercise, so you might want to think about it.” 

“Would it be that bad?” Holgate asked. “In, uh, real life?” Kas was glad she didn’t say “combat.”

“Doubt it,” Angel said sadly.

“You’ll be learning more about controlling your senses in Sentinel School,” Kas told him. “So yeah, probably not. Unless you run into some kind of weaponry designed to disable Sentinels—high frequency noise generators, something like that. That’s nothing you have to worry about,” he added to Angel. “But in special forces, for example, that’s something you would want to be prepared for,” he told Holgate. “In that case your unit would retreat, and the Sentinel might have to be assisted or even carried out. You just use the same techniques as with wounded; there’s nothing special to learn.” 

“What if the Guide isn’t there?” Nancy asked. Angel cowered back against Kas, and she added quickly, “Like when we’re in church or something.”

“Here? Just come get me. Any training situation, in fact, or anything that might happen in garrison or on leave, you’d just want to make sure the Sentinel doesn’t get hurt—pull him out of traffic or whatever—and send for the Guide or medical personnel. If you are medical personnel, you’ll be taught more in your advanced training,” he added. “Out in the field,” where, for example, it was possible that the Guide could be unavailable because of being killed or wounded, which he was not going to mention, “it’s more complex. There are things you can do to bring a Sentinel out of a zone if you aren’t a Guide, but what works and what makes it worse varies from one Sentinel to another. If your unit has a Sentinel, the Guide will make sure several of you are briefed on emergency procedures.” For his own assigned Sentinels, he made sure _everyone_ in the unit was briefed, even if the Sentinel didn’t like it. There were plenty of Ranger missions where only one or two soldiers came back alive. 

“But for now,” he continued, “just get me. When you start the field exercise, they’ll explain that you’re supposed to respond to everything as if you were in an actual field situation, but they’ll also tell you that the exception is a real-life injury—if somebody _actually_ breaks a leg, you don’t mess around doing field first aid; you stop playing and the DS’s bring in a real medical team. It’s the same with a Sentinel problem.”

“But you’ll _be_ there for the field exercise,” Angel said worriedly. “Right?” 

Kas nodded. “I’m sure I will be.” He’d talk to Sergeant Macon about it, but he was sure the DS realized that Angel wasn’t going to make it through the exercise without him. “But depending on how well you’re doing, I could be standing with the observers or something.”

The next day, the weather turned raw and wet. Angel was miserable, and pointed out to everyone who would listen that he was intended for warm climates. Shivering and carrying on about being cold did seem to distract him from worrying too much about firing his weapon, though—their next two lessons on the range went without incident. They also went without Angel hitting any targets, except for one in somebody else’s lane, purely by accident. Since the rifle range was an exercise trainees actually had to pass—unlike, say, grenades and bayonets, which they only had to try—Angel had to keep working on it after the rest of the platoon had finished. Sergeant Macon excused him from bayonet drill and several classroom lectures to take extra practice on the range. Angel griped about missing the lectures. “You’ve already been to them twice,” Kas reminded him.

“I know, but they’re _inside_. I’m freezing my fucking nuts off.”

Kas refrained from pointing out that the temperature, while chilly, was well above freezing. Instead he just stood between Angel and the wind and held Angel’s hands inside his coat, so his fingers wouldn’t be numb when it was his turn to shoot.

It was not difficult to tell why Angel was having so much trouble hitting targets. When he shot, he pointed the rifle downrange, then twisted his entire body away from it, turned his head, and closed his eyes before gingerly pulling the trigger. After firing, he usually dropped the rifle; often, he dropped it and jumped back, as if he thought it might bite him. 

After signing for another box of rounds, Kas decided to try something different. “Watch me,” he said, and demonstrated the right way to stand and fire. “See that? The recoil isn’t as bad if you hold it tight. And you want to keep looking the way you want it to go. Here.” He shifted the rifle to his left hand. “Get in front of me. Stand like I’m standing.” He demonstrated a proper firing stance with Angel pressed up against him. It would have worked better if they were closer to the same height—bracing the rifle stock against his own shoulder put it somewhere around Angel’s ear, and putting it at Angel’s shoulder was a decidedly awkward angle. “Put your hands on top of mine.”

Trapped between Kas and the rifle, Angel couldn’t wince away from it quite as dramatically as he usually did, and managed to stay more-or-less in a firing stance as Kas fired the rifle around him, although he did still close his eyes and turn his head. “Do you see how it doesn’t kick so much this way?”

Angel nodded. They did a few more that way, then Kas had Angel hold the rifle, with Kas’s hands on top of his. “That’s a lot better,” Kas said. He had actually nicked the edge of one of his targets. “Now let’s try aiming.”

After days of extra practice, he had Angel firing with correct form and not closing his eyes until a second or so before he fired. Angel was good for about ten shots like that, and could usually hit the target on two or three of them, before he got frustrated and weepy and reverted to his bad habits. And that was where progress stopped. 

“He’s not going to qualify,” Kas told Sergeant Macon one afternoon in his office. “He knows the safety rules, and he can shoot without crying now, but there’s no way in hell he’s going to make twenty shots out of forty.”

Macon chewed a stick of gum. “The standard for females is sixteen.”

“He’s not going to make sixteen, either. Maybe three.” 

A second stick of gum joined the first. “You a decent shot?”

Kas nodded. 

“You think you can manage to bring me twenty targets with holes in ‘em, if I don’t pay much attention to how they got that way?”

“Definitely.”

“All right, then. We’d better start talking about how we’re going to get him over the obstacle course.”

The obstacle course proved to be just as difficult as the rifle range, and like the range, it was an exercise he had to pass. Some of the obstacles, like crawling under barbed wire, Angel merely loathed. Others, like the rappelling tower, he was terrified of. These he eventually managed to do, as long as he was allowed to take all the time he needed and received constant reassurance from Kas. The climbing wall, however, proved a more enduring problem.

The wall, like the rest of the obstacles, had been designed to be challenging for a male recruit of average height. The women were provided with a step to help them reach the handholds, but even using it, Angel couldn’t reach. Olivia, who was about an inch taller than he was, couldn’t either. The three of them spent a long, wet afternoon working on it, and at many points Kas was ready to join them in tears of frustration. 

Olivia eventually moved through her frustration and emerged furious. She backed away from the wall, made a sort of war whoop, and made a running jump that put her halfway up the wall. She managed to grab a rain-slick handhold, only to slip off and sprawl in the mud. She got up, waving off Angel’s and Kas’s expressions of concern, and tried again, this time with a longer running start and a louder war-whoop. 

After five tries, Olivia, covered head to toe in mud, was on top of the wall. She delivered several more war-whoops from up there before sliding down the other side. Angel congratulated her warmly, then told Kas, “I can’t do that.”

Kas didn’t even know how she had done it, and had to agree. Eventually he decided to use the same approach they had used on the rifle range: Angel wasn’t getting over the wall on his own, but by God, he was getting over it. Kas first tried climbing it himself and pulling Angel up after him, which didn’t work—Angel was too short to reach his hands. Then he tried putting Angel on his shoulders and having him climb from there. Angel was afraid to let go of him. Finally, after Olivia asked for another turn on the wall, Kas had her stay up on top of it to catch Angel when Kas threw him up there, and then helped him down on the other side. He could not imagine that this performance could possibly lead to a passing score on the obstacle—and when they took the test, he would have to get a volunteer to sacrifice her own score to help Angel—but it was the best they were going to do. 

A few days later, they had gas mask drill. Angel started gibbering in terror as soon as he saw the masks being distributed. “I can’t do this,” he said. “Can I go do the wall again? Or the grenades? Or have my guts ripped out? I’m going to be sick.”

“Are you talking about the mask drill or the gas chamber?” Kas asked, tugging him away from the rest of the group. 

“Mostly the gas chamber. Except I can never get the masks on, and--”

“You don’t have to do it.”

Angel stopped short. “I don’t?”

“Nope. Sentinels don’t do the gas chamber in Basic.”

“They made me do it the first time,” Angel objected.

“Really? You had to take your mask off and everything?” In Kas’s basic training, the Sentinel in the platoon had wanted to do it; the DS finally let him go in with his mask on, but forbid him to take it off when everybody else did. 

“I never got my mask _on_ ,” Angel said. “And he threw me in there. Or had two of the others throw me in there; I’m not sure. It hurt to breathe for a week.”

“Did you go to the doctor?”

“No. I was coughing up this green shit for days, and if I tried to lie down it felt like I was going to drown, but he wouldn’t let me.”

Probably because if Angel _had_ gotten medical attention, Sergeant Hixon would have been up to his neck in shit for exposing a Sentinel to tear gas. Christ. “Well, he wasn’t supposed to make you do it. They do something with tear gas in Sentinel School--” Kas wasn’t sure exactly what “—but even that’s not the whole drill that they do here, where you take your mask off while you’re in the chamber.” He was sure of that, because he had learned that Sentinels had to do that in Ranger School, when the rest of them were being exposed to worse chemical weapons.

“Oh.” Angel went quiet, and Kas decided quickly not to give him time to brood.

“But you do have to be able to put your mask on, so pay attention.”

So all in all, as the field exercise grew closer and closer, it looked as though Angel really was going to make it this time, with just a few minor adjustments to the standard expectations. Liaison officers from the SRB or the Guide equivalent, G-TAC, would probably object to some of his methods, but Kas thought that he had done a good job with what he had to work with. 

At mail call a few days before the field exercises, he learned that the Army thought so, too. He received orders, “pending successful completion of current assignment,” to report to a Sentinel assigned to a Ranger unit destined for South America. It was the Sentinel who had started out in Ranger School with him—he was recycled, but must have successfully finished the course. That would be all right—he had seemed like a nice guy, the little that Kas had seen of him. Still, having the proof in his hand that his dream had been realized felt oddly…hollow. 

Angel climbed up onto Kas’s bunk with his own letter from home. “My mother’s excited about having me home for Christmas,” he reported. “Here, she sent me these cookies.” He shoved the tin at Kas, who took one. “She’s asking what I want for dinner my first night back….” 

Kas listened with half an ear as Angel rattled on about his mother’s cooking. He thought idly about how nice it would be to sit down to a meal where Angel would eat without being coaxed, then abruptly remembered that he wouldn’t be there. 

Angel must have been thinking along the same lines, because he said something like, “Wait until you try her--” Then stopped abruptly. 

“Yeah,” Kas said. “I’d like to meet your family, sweetheart, but it looks like I’m going somewhere else.” He showed Angel his orders. 

Angel sniffled and leaned in close to him. Kas put his arm around him. “That’s what you wanted,” he said, nodding toward the orders in Kas’s hand. “Right?”

“It’s what I asked for.” He wasn’t entirely sure it was what he wanted, anymore. He wondered if he’d ever see Angel again. A chance meeting, maybe, in a hospital or something. The Army was a small world. But Sentinels were such jealous bastards, whatever Sentinel he was assigned to then might not let him talk to Angel. 

“That’s good.” He rested his head on Kas’s shoulder. “I thought—I mean, I didn’t _really_ think, but—I was thinking like you’d just be with me.”

Somehow, they had avoided talking about what would happen after Angel finished Basic, but it looked like the time had come when they couldn’t avoid it any more. “You’ll be assigned a Guide after Sentinel School.” 

“But it won’t be you. I mean, you can’t just…stay?”

Kas shook his head. “I wish I could,” he said truthfully. “You _could_ request me. But they try to match up specialties…they’ll probably give you somebody with medical training, or somebody who wants to get some medical training.” Sentinels were allowed to request a particular Guide—there was a form for it—but the Army didn’t have to give them what they asked for. Guides didn’t get to make requests at all. The Army could take him away from his chosen specialty and give him to Angel. 

They wouldn’t do it. The Army had spent a lot of time and money training him for combat, and anyway, the liaison officers didn’t like young Sentinels getting too attached to any one Guide. Angel would probably have a different one every year through medical school. 

Somehow, Kas did not find this knowledge comforting. He usually resented the way the Army catered to Sentinels’ whims and ignored what Guides wanted, but now he had a sneaking suspicion that if they decided to give him to Angel, he’d be secretly relieved. “You’ll be okay,” he told Angel. “Any Guide you get will like you and be nice to you.” 

“I hope so,” Angel said, unconvinced. 

“They pretty much have to be,” Kas explained. “After this, you’ll always outrank your Guide.” He shrugged. It was a good thing Angel was a Sentinel—if he was a Guide, he’d have a whole different set of worries.

“So they’ll have like me because they aren’t _allowed_ not to?” Angel did not seem to find this information reassuring. “That sucks.”

“Well, yeah. But they will, really like you. As long as you don’t turn into some kind of raging asshole after Sentinel School.”

Angel stared down at his toes. “Will it be like this?”

“Will what be like what?”

“Sentinel School. And Army medical school. Like—you know, this.” He gestured around the barracks.

Oh, that. “No. Well, I don’t know what Sentinel School is like, since I’ve never been.” 

“What’s Guide School like?”

Answering that question honestly would _not_ allay any of Angel’s fears. “Guide training _is_ a lot like this, but it’s different for us. We go to the Guide Training and Assignment Center first, then G-TAC assigns us to one of the military branches and turns us over to them for Basic. After Basic there’s…I forget what the Army calls it. Guide Orientation, something like that. That’s like a day or two, mostly going over the Army regulations for Sentinels and Guides. You guys do Basic first, and then Sentinel School’s mostly about learning to use your senses.” Angel’s most pressing worry was probably whether the instructors were mean or not, but Kas had no idea. He moved on to what he thought would be reassuring information. “I can’t imagine they make you share quarters, like this. Sentinels are territorial. You probably get private rooms, or else you share with one roommate.”

“Oh. I guess that’ll be better.”

“Uh-huh.” What else did he know about Sentinel School? “There are Guides there.” He knew that because the Guide orientation briefing had mentioned it as a possible special assignment for Army Guides. It was something you were picked for, not that you picked, and no one had any idea whether being selected for it was an honor or a punishment. Guides assigned to Sentinel School never seemed to turn up anywhere else. “I don’t know if they assign you one for the duration, or how they do it.” 

“I wish you could go with me. I know I’d be okay if you were there.”

“You could ask…I don’t know, Doctor Whitmore. You see him tomorrow, don’t you?”

Angel nodded. “You mean he might say I’ll go crazy again if you aren’t there?”

“Well, no. I meant he would know more about Sentinel School than I do,” Kas explained. “He could give you a better idea of what it’s like. But…well, if there is some way I could go with you, he’d know how to arrange it, yeah. I kind of bet there isn’t, since they have their own Guides that work there, but you could check just to be sure.”

“I guess he’d know about Army medical school, too,” Angel said. “Since he went there.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine, there,” Kas said, on firmer ground now. “I haven’t talked to anybody who went there, but I know lots of Guides who went to the Army’s language school.” Some of them had gone with Sentinels, others were sent their on their own because the Army needed some place to put them when they didn’t have a Sentinel at the moment. “I’m sure the medical school is the same way. You live in a dorm room—it would probably just be you and your Guide in the room—and there’s a dining hall. Regular Army food is better than what you get here, so I’m sure that’s fine. Usually you get a couple of choices, like at any cafeteria. As long as you get decent grades and don’t get in trouble, you can get passes into town pretty much any time you want to.” The guys he’d met who had been there solo emphasized that point, which was an almost unprecedented freedom for Guides. 

“Do they yell and make you do pushups?” Angel asked.

“Uh…they have PT and drill a couple of times a week,” Kas said. “But it’s like an hour in the morning and you’re done. For your regular classes, the instructors are just regular teachers, like anywhere. I guess some of them are stricter than others, but they don’t drop you if you get the answers wrong, no. I’m not sure if you’ll have inspections,” he added. “Guides do at the language school, but we’re enlisted. Sentinels and medical personnel are officers. But if they do, there isn’t much to it. They just check if you have your stuff put away and you don’t have anything you’re not supposed to, like drugs. And,” he realized, “your Guide would be taking care of all that, anyway.”

“Oh.” 

“You’ll be fine,” he said again. Angel did not seem particularly reassured, but did eventually go to bed.

The next day, while Angel was at church and his appointments, Kas took himself to the Base Exchange to stock up on a few non-regulation supplies for the field exercise. They’d be starting with a long march to a bivouac site, then camp there for a day or two until the war games portion of the exercise started. The exercise was actually sort of fun, if you liked that sort of thing, but Angel most emphatically did not. While the trainees would be equipped with tents, C-rats, and other luxuries that Kas would have killed for in Ranger School, he knew Angel would be uncomfortable and cranky. The field exercise was meant to simulate a combat experience, and the Guide of a Sentinel headed for combat would always plan ahead by scrounging any little luxuries that might help keep the Sentinel comfortable, so Kas was confident that his shopping expedition was well within the spirit of the exercise. 

The first things he went for were long underwear and extra socks. It was likely to be chilly and damp, but if he could keep Angel’s feet dry, they’d both be significantly happier. He also found some chemical heat packs and a few extra fuel tablets for the portable stoves that were meant for heating C-rats. Hot shaving water was another one of those little things that could make a big difference. An extra flashlight and some glow sticks. He honestly didn’t know if Angel was afraid of the dark, but at this point, he would not be surprised. And because he doubted Angel would survive for a week on C-rats, he added an assortment of nonperishable snacks, like beef jerky, nuts, dried fruit, and candy. All in all, it was about ten pounds on top of the normal pack—and he had no illusions about who would be carrying it—but well worth it if the extras kept Angel functioning. 

Another thing he’d have to do, fairly soon, was write the letter for Angel’s next Guide. He could, at least, just hand it to Angel instead of hiding it somewhere in his possessions for the next Guide to find, but he had no idea what to put in it. The challenges the next Guide would face with him would be totally different—and after Sentinel School, would Angel be the same? Angel, at this point, didn’t know that he was supposed to be treating his Guide like a pet, but he’d learn. 

With a mental shrug, Kas stowed his purchases in his footlocker, being careful to secure it—he would not be at all amused if the other trainees stole Angel’s snacks—and went off to retrieve his Sentinel. 

Angel was waiting for him on the porch of the infirmary building. When he saw Kas, he beamed and hopped down the steps. “Kas!”

“Hi,” Kas said. Angel attached himself to him for a hug, which Kas returned. 

“Let’s go for a walk,” Angel said. 

Kas raised an eyebrow. Angel voluntarily engaging in physical exercise? What a strange day. “Okay.” 

Angel looped his arm in his and they strolled toward the parade ground. After a while he said, “So Father Dougherty said that if we really wanted to stay together, we could Bond. Then he said we shouldn’t because of me being young and everything. And that the Army guys would be mad about it. But they couldn’t actually stop us.”

“Uh…yeah,” Kas said. Right, Angel was just talking, like he did. Bonding was one aspect of Army life they hadn’t talked about yet; naturally Angel would be curious. “The regular Army,” which here meant everyone who wasn’t a Sentinel or Guide, including liaison officers, “is pretty uncomfortable about the whole topic of Bonding. Too mystical for them.” Also too homoerotic, but Kas wouldn’t mention that just now. “Your first hitch—your first six years—you’ll get a different Guide every year or so. People usually don’t Bond until their second hitch or later.” The Sentinel’s second hitch, that was. It didn’t matter as much for Guides, who usually Bonded as soon as they had a Sentinel ask them. 

Angel nodded. “That’s what Father Dougherty said. But it’s not a rule. Not a real rule. They kind of pretend like it is, but it isn’t.”

“Right. More of a tradition. But since it is a lifetime commitment, it’s not something you want to rush into. Just like, you know, you don’t marry the first person you ever dated.” Bonded pairs didn’t _necessarily_ have a sexual relationship, but they almost always did. 

“Where I come from, lots of people do,” Angel said. “But yeah. It kind of makes sense, to work with a few Guides before you pick. Except.”

“Except what?”

“Well, I asked Doctor Whitmore, if after you’ve had six Guides or whatever, can you get one of the earlier ones back. And he said no, they don’t do it that way. You can put in a request, but the Army doesn’t have to let you.”

“Right,” Kas said. “They can’t stop you from Bonding, but they don’t have to make it easy, and they don’t.” 

“Right,” Angel said. “So?”

“So what?”

Angel looked crestfallen. “Right. I guess you want to go be in the Rangers, like you planned. That’s okay. I’ll, um, I probably shouldn’t have even said anything.”

“Wait a minute.” Kas ran back over the conversation in his head. “Did you just _propose_?”

Angel’s expression turned faintly hopeful. “It wasn’t very good, was it? I could do it over.”

“No, it’s fine. I just…I have to think about it.” Was he really thinking that he’d say yes? He’d be throwing away his career. Disappointing everyone who had helped him become a Ranger. Acting like a typical Guide, running off to Bond the first chance he got and never mind any other plans he might have had. 

Staying with a Sentinel he loved. Shit.

Angel stared down at his boots for a while, taking little sidelong glances up at Kas every now and then. 

It was like standing on the edge of a cliff. He could rappel down, if he trusted his harness, into unseen depths. Or he could stay up top, where there was a path laid out for him. Where did his duty lay? His desire?

“You know it’s permanent, right?” 

Angel nodded. “Like being married.”

“Right. But there’s no divorce. Till death do us part, no exceptions.”

“I know,” Angel said, touching the cross and St. Christopher’s medal that he wore on a chain around his neck. 

Right, he was Catholic, so no divorce, anyway. But that reminded Kas of another problem. “Your family would probably rather see you with a woman Guide,” he added. Kas himself didn’t much care what his parents and sister thought of who he Bonded with, but it would be different for Angel. “That way you could get married, have kids.”

“I wouldn’t be getting married anyway,” Angel said, glancing up at Kas to see if he understood what Angel wasn’t quite saying.

Kas was not at all surprised, but hadn’t been sure if Angel realized that yet. “Okay.”

“Is that all right?” Angel asked.

Kas nodded. “Sure.”

“It’s normal for Sentinels and Guides to…you know. I read about it in the encyclopedia.”

“It is,” Kas confirmed. He had thought it was entirely possible that Angel had no idea, but at least he knew that much about what he was getting into. 

“And it’s allowed, in the Army, if you’re a Sentinel. The Church still doesn’t like it, but I asked the priest at home, and he said it’s not really a big deal, for Bonded Sentinels. Like my aunt who’s on the Pill. She’s married, so they look the other way, even though _technically_ it’s still a sin.”

It was reassuring to know that Angel must have given his sexual persuasion some thought before now, if he had been researching the subject. 

“Anyway, my family would want me to be happy,” Angel said firmly. “And I already told them all about you in my letters. So that’s all right.” 

“Are you sure you want to? Cause I have to tell you, Ang, it would be monumentally stupid to make a decision like this because you’re scared to go to Sentinel School by yourself.” It would also be monumentally stupid for Kas to say “yes” because he was worried about how Angel would survive without him, but there they were. 

“I’m not. I mean, I am. Scared to go to Sentinel School by myself. But I do want to. Except you’d have to give up being in the Rangers. There isn’t any way around that, unless I was one too, and, well, you know.”

“Right, that’s not going to happen.” Angel barely survived Basic; Ranger School would kill him. “That’s…I might be okay with that. I need some time to think.” 

Angel nodded solemnly. “Take all the time you need. Uh, except we would have to do it soon, I guess. And I don’t actually know how to do it.”

“The Bonding itself is easy. All we’d have to do is open a working link and leave it open until we’re Bonded. Usually takes about a day.” Some pairs took leave and made an occasion of it, even combining the Bond with a wedding if they were an opposite-sex pair, but it wasn’t necessary. “The hard part is making sure you stay in physical contact to keep the link open; we’d have to think about when we could do it without interfering too much with your training.”

“On a Sunday,” Angel suggested. 

Kas nodded. That could work. “Sunday after field exercise, or graduation day. Graduation day would be…very obvious.” It might be wise to minimize the number of brass who knew what they were up to before it was a done deal. “So the earlier Sunday would better.”

“We don’t want anyone to know?”

“Uh…not quite. It would be better if…people who don’t know us, didn’t know about it until it was done.” He was thinking specifically of the liaison officers, who he was pretty sure would shit a collective ton of bricks. “But it’s good that you talked to Father Dougherty, and I guess Doctor Whitmore,” he added doutbtfully.

“Oh, I didn’t tell him I was going to ask you,” Angel said. “I just said I was curious about Bonding. Which I am,” he added. “And I did ask him about if you could go to Sentinel School with me, only that’s when he got really suspicious and started talking about how I had better not be planning to throw my life away on the first Guide I met.”

“Right.” In that context, Kas could see how Whitmore’s suspicions would be raised. 

“But he kept going on about how it would be unwise, so I don’t think he actually can stop us, or he’d have said that.”

Kas nodded. “Yeah.” 

“So you have a week to think about it,” Angel said. 

That wasn’t much time. Or maybe it was too much. What he really wanted was to be able to stay with Angel for a _little_ longer, without committing to the rest of his life. If he could see him through Sentinel School and get him settled in med school, _then_ make a decision…

But he couldn’t. The choice was to either Bond next week, or part in two weeks and quite possibly never see Angel again. 

And as much as he resisted the idea of rushing into a Bond, the idea of never seeing Angel again was worse. He did love the little shit. 

“Yes.”

Angel nodded. “Well, six days, I guess. If we start in the morning.”

“No, I mean, I’m saying yes.”

“Oh!” Angel hugged him frantically. “Yes! That yes! Are you sure? I hope you’re sure.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Kas said, growing more sure as he said it. 

“Okay! Then I had better go write to my mom.”

Angel made it through the field exercise with little trauma. He groused predictably about the long cross-country hike in full gear, but thanks to the progress he and Kas had made—and the hypoallergenic socks—he groused while doing it, rather than while huddled on the ground weeping. When they reached the bivouac site, he volunteered for KP, which he was willingly given since the rest of squad four was eager to try the more rugged chores. Field KP involved little more than opening cans, but Angel seemed to enjoy it. 

When the war game started, Holgate brilliantly assigned Angel to first aid—Kas didn’t even have ask her to do it. First aid was by far his best thing, and he happily set up a first aid area at the back of the bunker they were assigned to defend from the “enemy,” played by various drill sergeants. Shortly after the game started, the pretend wounded began to roll in. A trainee—say, Olivia—would be informed by the training evaluators that she had suffered, say, a sucking chest wound or a broken finger. Two or three of the others would carry her back to Angel—or she would walk, in the case of the broken finger—and he would explain to the evaluator how he would treat the problem. When Olivia had her sucking chest would, Angel managed to stabilize her for med-evac, and she was out of the game for several hours. Later, he treated her pretend broken finger effectively enough that she was able to return to duty. 

On the second day, the enemy overcame squad four’s defenses and took the bunker. Most of squad four were killed, a few others taken prisoner. Since first aid was tucked away in the back of the bunker, Angel and his wounded were the last ones alive and free. 

“The rest of your unit has been taken,” one of the DS’s announced. “Surrender and your wounded will receive medical attention.”

Kas expected Angel to surrender promptly, but instead he dove for his rifle and pretended to shoot one of the DS’s, who promptly pretended to return fire. 

“Temas, you’re dead,” said the evaluator. 

“Did I get him?” Angel asked, indicating the man he had “shot.”

The evaluator made a note. “Yes, but you’re still dead.” 

Kas took him back to the KIA room. “Why’d you shoot him?” he asked on the way.

“He was the drill sergeant my first time through.”

“Oh.” Kas considered that. “Good choice. You might want to have a different answer for when the evaluators ask you, though.”

If Kas had had time to coach him, he would have advised an answer based on panic or forgetting what he had been taught about when and when not to surrender, either of which would be completely believable coming from him. He didn’t have time, though, and what Angel said when asked was, “I didn’t trust him, sir.”

“You didn’t trust him,” the evaluator repeated.

“Right. I didn’t think he’d follow the Geneva Convention. I figured even if I was dead, my patients would have a better chance if I killed him first. Sir.”

“And you thought this because…?”

“I’ve met him before, sir.”

“In this wargame?”

“No,” Angel said, before Kas could stop him. “Sir.” 

If the evaluator understood what Angel was saying—that he thought Sergeant Hixon would violate the Geneva Convention in real life—they could be in some seriously deep shit. After a long moment, the officer just said, “Private Temas, refrain from embellishing the war game scenario.”

“Yessir.” 

Angel’s patients soon joined them in the KIA room, and were not at all happy about Angel getting them killed. The deceased had to do four hours of PT and chores before they were brought back to life, while the captured were released almost immediately, so Kas figured he was paying sufficiently for the momentary pleasure of pretend-killing Hixon. But when they were finally sent back to the bunker—which had been given back to squad four since the game wasn’t supposed to end for another day—Kas asked, “Was it worth it?”

“Hell, yeah. I hope he comes back so I can kill him again.”

He didn’t get the chance, however. A vocal minority who were still a little sore about him getting the wounded killed assigned him to the night watch, directly in front of the main entrance to the bunker, in the openly-voiced hope that he would get himself “killed” again as soon as possible. 

Six weeks of exposure to Angel, however, had clearly made them forget what Sentinels were _for_. Angel’s hyper-sensitive hearing made barracks life a misery for him and turned him into a basket case on the range, but it also meant that the no matter how stealthy the “enemy” tried to be, every time they approached to attack, Angel had heard them coming far enough away to have a whole squad woken up and waiting for them. When the enemy started trying to take him out with sniper fire, Kas helped him find a less open position from which he could still listen for any attempted incursion. At dawn he finally stumbled back to his first aid station, crabbily announcing that if anybody came in wounded he would shoot them himself, and dragged Kas behind a couple of sandbags to curl up in his lap for a rest.

He didn’t really sleep—there was too much going on around them for that—but he rested a little, and by the time some wounded came in, he got up and tended them with a minimum of ill-humor. 

When the war game ended and the trainees still held the bunker, everyone still “alive” was allowed to ride back to the barracks in a truck. The few KIAs—mostly a group from squad one who had decided to go on a completely unnecessary scouting mission—had to hike home. Kas was tremendously relieved that Angel was among the living. He could barely keep his eyes open during the ride home; if they were hiking, Kas would probably have had to carry him. 

“I can’t _wait_ to take a shower,” Nancy said, to general agreement from squad four. 

Only Angel disagreed. “Mm gonna sleeeeeeeeeeeep,” he groaned into Kas’s shoulder.

“You’ll have to clean your weapons first,” Kas pointed out. 

“We can sleep in tomorrow,” Olivia pointed out. “Today’s Saturday, isn’t it?”

Angel sat up straight. “It is?” he asked, looking at Kas for confirmation.

“Uh-huh.”

“Are we still…?”

“Yep. If you still want to,” Kas added, suddenly nervous.

“Of course I do,” Angel said indignantly, before settling down against Kas’s shoulder again. 

Back at the barracks, Kas poured Angel into bed and cleaned his gear for him, deciding it was the least he could do, as a Bonding present. Angel was exhausted enough now to sleep hard; he barely woke even when the squad one KIAs came trooping in. 

Kas, on the other hand, had trouble getting to sleep. Tomorrow he’d be Bonded. He _had_ imagined himself Bonded before—all Guides did, he supposed—but he had always pictured someone more like himself. A combat soldier, maybe even a Ranger. Hell, he had wanted to be a Ranger in the first place because of a TV show he’d loved as a kid, about a Sentinel and Guide in the Rangers in World War Two. 

Except somehow he hadn’t noticed, as a kid, that it was the Sentinel of the pair who was always killing Nazis and having other dashing adventures, while the Guide followed him around with a soppy, adoring look on his face, and occasionally got captured so that the Sentinel could rescue him. He hadn’t realized that it was the Sentinel he wanted to be like, not the Guide. Guides were expected to be easily overwhelmed by their emotions, in need of a Sentinel’s protection—notwithstanding that it was actually _Sentinels_ who wound up in serious trouble if they didn’t have Guides to help them manage their senses. Dealing with Sentinels was a delicate balancing act, silently and invisibly meeting all of their needs without giving the slightest hint that he had ever noticed that Sentinels actually needed Guides. 

Except Angel. It didn’t seem to occur to him to be embarrassed that he needed Kas, or that Kas was competent. And it wasn’t, really, that Angel was as weak as he had appeared when they first met. He had his own strengths—his performance in the field exercise proved that. Kas had no doubt that he would succeed in his chosen field. 

But—in Angel’s world, there was plenty of room for Kas to be good at things, too. Better than Angel, even. Hell, no wonder Kas loved him. Except for the small matter of the senses, he was the Sentinel in their relationship. Soppy adoring looks and all. 

Enough Kas told himself firmly. If he couldn’t sleep, he had damn well better _pretend_ , because it was going to be a long day tomorrow.

Schooling himself to take steady, even breaths, Kas eventually fell asleep. He woke again only when Angel climbed up onto his bunk, in the morning. “Kas? Are you awake yet? When should we start? We can go back to sleep if you want to, but I wasn’t sure how much time we needed.”

Kas scrubbed his face with his hand. “Yeah. I’m up. Go take a shower; I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Is that part of it? Taking a shower?”

“No, but after we start we’re going to be Siamese twins for the rest of the day,” Kas pointed out. “Go on, I’ll be right there.”

After they had showered, shaved, and dressed, Kas sat Angel down on the edge of his bunk and took Angel’s right hand in his left. Mouth suddenly dry, he took out a bandana he’d carefully folded into a narrow strip. “This is the tricky part. We tie this around our wrists.”

“Oh. So we don’t let go and break the link by accident?”

“Probably, yeah,” Kas agreed. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it was an old tradition--old enough that the reason it was done using the Guide’s right hand and the Sentinel’s left so the Sentinel would be free to draw a sword if he had to. “Although another Guide once told me, it’s because if you can’t manage to tie a knot with your left hand and his right, you have no business being Bonded in the first place.”

With some maneuvering, they managed to get it tied. Angel let out a sigh of relief when they did.

“Ready?” Kas asked. 

Angel nodded.

He opened the link. Checking Angel’s dials, he found them steady, a good sign that Angel wasn’t particularly stressed. “Okay. Now all we have to do is wait.”

Kas got Angel to lie back down—although now they had to squeeze into one bunk—until the rest of the platoon got up. The rest of the men appeared not to notice that the two of them were holding hands—but maybe, by this point, they were no longer capable of surprise about anything Angel got up to. When they met up with the girls downstairs, though, Olivia took one look at them and squealed, “Fuck! You guys are _Bonding_?!”

Angel winced. “Yeah. There might be a few people in the next state who didn’t hear; maybe you should say it again.”

“That’s so romantic,” Olivia said with a sigh. “You should have told us! We could have been bridesmaids!”

“Bridesmaids in camo?” Nancy asked skeptically.

“There aren’t any bridesmaids in a Bonding,” Kas said. 

“When Diane bonded with Dmitri on _Guiding Light_ , she had bridesmaids,” Olivia protested. “Well, actually it turned out it was Dmitri’s evil twin, and they barely found out in time before the Bonding was finished. But they had bridesmaids!”

“Okay, in soap operas, there are bridesmaids,” Kas said. “If there’s also a bride.”

“Well, we could be something,” Olivia said. 

“There isn’t really anything for you guys to do,” Angel said. “Is there, Kas?”

Kas shook his head. “No. It’s nice of you to offer, but I can’t think of anything. What you usually see on TV is a Bonding combined with a wedding. This is pretty much it, for us,” he explained, holding up their joined hands.

“Well, it’s still romantic,” Olivia said.

“Actually,” Angel said, “I thought I’d ask Father Dougherty to say a blessing for us. If that’s okay,” he added to Kas.

“They do that in your church?” Kas asked. Raised a Christmas-and-Easter Episcopalian, Kas honestly had no idea what his own religion’s position on Bonding was, let alone same-sex ones. He had a feeling that like most other embarrassing topics, Episcopalians pretended it didn’t exist. 

“Catholics have blessings for everything.” 

It was about then that Sergeant Macon asked if they would mind getting into formation sometime that day, so they did, and marched off to breakfast.

When they were dismissed from chow, Olivia and two of the other girls ran ahead of them toward the chapel. When Kas and Angel caught up, Kas saw them deep in conversation with the chaplain, who as usual was standing outside the building to welcome the flock. This was where Kas and Angel usually parted ways, but today, obviously, he was going to church. As they approached, Olivia and the others scampered off.

“They’re up to something,” Angel observed.

“Uh-huh.” 

A wave of brand-new trainees, obvious by the rawness of their haircuts, interceded between them and the priest, and they were able to get inside and take seats without challenge. Kas found that the service wasn’t much different from the ones he remembered from childhood, except mercifully briefer, which made sense for an ordinary Sunday on an Army base. 

“Last week was ‘peace,’” Angel whispered to Kas as the priest began his sermon on “joy.” “I thought that was funny.”

Next were the hymns, and Kas discovered that Angel must not have been kidding about being lousy in marching band—Sentinels usually had a decent ear for pitch, but Angel was clearly not one of them. 

As the service came to an end, Kas began to grow nervous. Angel wasn’t particularly religious—he went to church every week mostly because he had promised his mother—but he did like Father Dougherty, who was the only person on the base who had always been nice to him, before Kas arrived. If the priest disapproved of their Bonding, Kas was sure Angel’s feelings would be hurt. 

But when they met Father Dougherty in his office after the service, he just glanced at their hands and said, “I understand congratulations are in order.”

“Um, yes,” Angel said. “I know, you said it wasn’t a good idea, Father…”

The priest smiled indulgently. “I expected you would anyway, if your Guide agreed. If you had given me a little warning, I’d have dusted off my sermon on ‘love.’ I’m doing that one next week.”

“That’s okay,” Angel said, giving Kas’s hand a squeeze. “We were going to ask you for a blessing.”

“Of course. If you would come back after your appointment with Doctor Whitmore, that would give me some time to…prepare.” 

Father Dougherty looked decidedly shifty, and Kas and Angel exchanged a look. “Spill,” said Angel.

“The young asked me to make sure you were back here at ten,” he admitted. “They’re planning a small surprise.”

“If they come back here wearing taffeta and blue eye shadow, I don’t know what I’ll do,” Kas said. 

“You’re very fortunate that the base exchange doesn’t stock bridesmaid’s dresses,” Father Dougherty said. “Under the circumstances, I believe they’re thinking more along the lines of a cake.”

That wasn’t so bad. Angel perked up. “I like cake.”

“You aren’t supposed to have cake in Basic training,” Kas pointed out. Except for the cake in C-rats, anyway. 

“The young ladies are speaking to Sergeant Macon about an exception,” Father Dougherty said helpfully. “Now, David and Jonathan or Ruth and Naomi?”

Angel looked inquiringly up at Kas. “Uh?” Kas said.

“For the scripture reading,” Angel explained. 

“You pick,” Kas said. He had only the vaguest idea of who those were.

“Ruth and Naomi’s prettier,” Angel decided. 

“It’s more romantic,” Father Dougherty said with a nod. “David and Jonathan is a little more masculine in tone. You could choose something else, but those are the two I thought of offhand.”

Angel looked up at him again. “Ruth and Naomi’s the ‘whither thou goest’ one. In David and Jonathan they die at the end.”

“Ruth and Naomi, then,” Kas agreed. 

With that decided, they moved on to talking about the field exercise and Angel’s upcoming week of testing. Angel admitted to slight nervousness, but Father Dougherty observed that he seemed much more prepared than before, and Kas agreed wholeheartedly. 

After a short while, they left the priest to get ready for their blessing and went to the infirmary. Angel led him past the treatment rooms, saying, “We usually just meet in his office. It’s back this way.”

Doctor Whitmore met them in the hallway. “Sentinel Temas, you’re looking better. Dillinger, you can go.”

“Uh,” Angel said, holding up their Bound hands. 

Whitmore went very still and silent, anger and disapproval pouring off of him almost palpably. “Guide Dillinger,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

Before he had time to think better of it, Kas said, “Temas, actually, sir.” Did he really think the moment called for flippancy?

“Guide Dillinger,” Whitmore repeated, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“Bonding, sir,” Kas said. Apparently flippancy was how he was going to play this.

“You are _not_ Bonding. Temas,” he snapped, “I don’t know what he said to talk you into this, but it’s a terrible mistake.”

“It was my idea,” Angel said, squeezing Kas’s hand painfully hard.

“Of course you think it was,” Whitmore said, shaking his head. “You have no idea how manipulative Guides can be. You’ll learn in Sentinel School, but that will be too late, won’t it?” He glared at Kas. “I guarantee you that whoever recommended you for this duty did _not_ expect that you would take advantage of your position to entrap a weak Sentinel into Bonding.”

Kas was shocked. The idea of Bond-happy Guides who were out to snare a Sentinel any way they could wasn’t new to him, but he had never thought to have that slur applied to him. For a couple of years liaison officers had been hinting—or at times outright saying—that he ought to stop being so damned independent and accept his role as a Sentinel’s support system. Bonding was supposed to be the ultimate goal of any appropriately submissive Guide, but it seemed that he couldn’t win for losing. 

Before Kas had a chance to formulate a response, Angel was saying, “Excuse me? Entrap? Weak Sentinel? I asked him, and I’m damn lucky he said yes!” Through the open link, Kas could feel that Angel’s usual undercurrent of anxiety was overwhelmed by righteous anger. 

“That’s what you think now,” Whitmore said in a maddeningly patient voice. 

“I’m the one who would know.”

“Dillinger—Kas,” Whitmore said, “is the first Guide you’ve ever worked with, isn’t he?”

Whitmore had to know perfectly well that he was, but let the silence stretch until Angel reluctantly said, “Yes.”

“The way you’re feeling now is perfectly understandable. It’s natural for Sentinels to feel attached to Guides. But you would feel the same way about any Guide. There’s no reason to tie yourself down this early.”

Kas thought privately that Whitmore would have had a greater chance of success if he had lead with that, rather than with insulting Kas. As it was, all he’d managed to do was awaken Angel’s protective instincts. 

“As an Army Sentinel, you’ll always have a Guide assigned to you—and you’ll see, they’re all pretty much the same.”

“If that’s true, then there’s no reason I shouldn’t Bond with Kas,” Angel pointed out reasonably. 

“Kas has clearly gained the upper hand in this relationship, and it’s…disappointing, but not particularly surprising that he would attempt to continue that rather than be reassigned to a Sentinel who would deal with him more appropriately.”

Whitmore should have known better than to refer to _another Sentinel having his Guide_ in front of a half-Bonded Sentinel. Angel practically growled. “Kas is _my Guide_. He stays with me.”

It would have been funny, in other circumstances, to see Angel coming over all Sentinel-possessive. “It’s okay, Ang,” Kas said soothingly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Damn right you’re not.”

Kas saw the slightest hint of a smile cross Whitmore’s face. Was the doctor _really_ handling this all wrong, or was Angel being played? So far Kas had seen no evidence that Angel had any of the aggressive instincts Sentinels were known for, but if anything would bring them out, a threat to his Bond would. 

“Temas, it’s not too late for you to stop this now,” Whitmore continued, “before you make a mistake that will haunt you the rest of your life.”

“I’m not making a mistake. Not that it’s any of your business if I am.”

They went round and round like that for a while longer. It was certainly a testament to the progress they had made that Angel was able to stand firm; the fragile Sentinel Kas had first taken under his wing would have wilted under this intense opposition. He might not have given in—he had always had a core of stubbornness to him—but he would have curled up and cried, which he certainly wasn’t doing now. Finally Whitmore dismissed them with the fervent hope that Sentinel School would teach Angel how to manage his Guide.

“All right?” Kas asked as they walked back to the chapel.

Angel nodded tightly. Kas could feel some of the anger draining off of him, leaving him shaken and unsure. “Is everybody going to think that? That you’re some kind of—I don’t even know what you’d call it.”

“Grasping Guide who’s leading you around by your dick,” Kas supplied. “No. Not everyone.” He left unsaid that yes, some people would. “You know Father Dougherty and our friends don’t think that.”

Angel cheered slightly. “I wonder if they managed to find cake?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

When they reached chapel, they found the sanctuary empty. “Over here,” Angel said, heading for a door off to the side. Angel carefully dialed down his hearing before opening it. 

“Surprise!” yelled the girls of squad four, when they stepped inside. They managed a pretty impressive volume; it was a good thing Angel had not actually been surprised. 

Over a table was a banner reading, “Congratulations Angel and Kas!!” in bubble letters. It appeared to have been made on a long strip of the paper towels found in the latrines. On the table was a large bowl of violently red punch and pile of unwrapped snack cakes—mostly Twinkies and HoHos—arranged into a shape that vaguely approximated a multi-tiered cake. 

“You guys, this is great!” Angel enthused, as they all came up and hugged him. “Look at you, you look like girls!” 

It was true—the girls had all put on their dress uniforms, which consisted of a skirt, jacket, and blouse, worn with pantyhose and high heels. Some of them even had a little makeup on. After seeing them in nothing but fatigues for two months, the effect was startling. Kas felt distinctly under-dressed, but at least there was no taffeta.

When Father Dougherty called them to attention and read from the bible, Kas realized that he did know the Ruth and Naomi verse. It was the one that went:

_And Ruth said, entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following thee, for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the lord do so to me, if aught but death part thee and me._

Kas supposed everybody knew that verse; it was the one they always used in weddings on TV. It was oddly appropriate for a Bonding—where Angel went, he would go, and where Angel lived, he would live. And he supposed any future interactions with God in his future would be more Catholic than Episcopalian. And, of course, nothing but death could break a Bonding. 

They knelt to have the blessing said over them. When it was finished, Angel crossed himself, which he hadn’t bothered to do during the actual Mass, and looked solemnly at Kas for a moment before they stood up and the girls started yelling for them to kiss. 

Angel went up on his toes, murmuring, “It’s the only way to shut them up,” and Kas bent and brushed his lips against his. This set an unfortunate precedent, as they were then badgered into feeding each other Twinkies. 

“Now do the thing where you smash the cake into his face,” Olivia suggested.

“No,” Angel said. 

“Aw, come on.”

“Seriously, no.”

But Olivia wouldn’t let up about it until Nancy shoved a Ring-Ding in _her_ face, and for a moment Kas thought their Bonding party, which was already pretty weird, was going to turn into a food fight. But Father Dougherty was able to settle them down by reminding them that they were, after all, in a house of worship.

It wouldn’t be until much later that Kas would find out how unusual their party had been. Life in the Army was a mixture of unrelenting tedium only occasionally lightened by pants-crapping terror, and as such soldiers would latch onto almost any excuse for a party—except a Bonding. A Bonding combined with a wedding, maybe—although pairs doing that usually managed to get a home leave—but Kas never met another Sentinel and Guide who were thrown a Bonding surprise party by their entire squad. Sometimes the Sentinel had drinks bought for him, but that was about the extent of it.

By lights-out that night, Kas thought that their Bond was established, but since he wasn’t completely sure—he’d never done this before, after all—he squeezed into Angel’s bunk with him again. This time, Angel curled up with his head on Kas’s chest. 

“You okay?” Kas asked. They had worked on using Kas’s heartbeat as a focus when Angel was overwhelmed or in need of comfort. 

“Uh-huh. It’s nice.” He stroked Kas’s arm with his free hand. “Can we sleep like this all the time? After we leave here?”

“If you want to,” Kas said. It was, in fact, completely Angel’s call, if Angel wanted it to be, but he didn’t think Angel would be the heavy-handed kind of Sentinel. 

“Thanks, Kas. You’re the best. The best Guide. My Guide.”

“Uh-huh. You know, you have a test in the morning,” Kas hinted. Now that Angel was going to be his commanding officer for the rest of his life, it was probably time to ease back on telling him what to do. 

“You think I should study?”

“No, I think you should shut up and go to sleep.”

“Oh. Well, okay.” 

In the morning when Kas untied their hands, Angel clung to his hand, looking anxious. “You have to let go, sweetheart,” Kas pointed out gently.

Angel reluctantly let go. “Did it work?”

For a second, Kas thought it hadn’t—the empty space where the working link had been echoed. But he felt around inside his head and found the Bond. He tugged on it. 

Angel’s eyes went wide. “Oh!”

“It worked,” Kas said unnecessarily. “Come on, we have PT in fifteen minutes.”

Throughout the morning, as Angel took his written tests and Kas stood in the back of the room trying not to fall asleep, every now and then Angel would reach for the Bond, and for a second Kas would sense his anxiety before he calmed. Was that normal? The Bonded Guides he had spoken to said that they were very aware of the new Bond for the first few days, but that playing with it tended to annoy Sentinels. He’d never heard of a Sentinel playing with it. Still, it was a way for Angel to seek reassurance without attracting any attention from anyone but Kas, and that had to be a good thing. Moving forward to Sentinel School and med school, it would be better if he could at least appear confident. 

After the tests were finished, they were given orders to report to the SRB liaison officer. Angel grabbed his arm. “What’s that about?”

Kas shook his head. “No idea. I’m sure it’s okay.”

He wasn’t completely sure, though, and with the Bond, Angel could probably tell. Once they got to the administration building and found the right office, they were left cooling their heels in the hallway for a while. That, at least, wasn’t surprising. In Kas’s experience, liaison officers enjoyed petty displays of power, although the SRB ones weren’t quite as bad as the G-TAC ones.

Finally, they were called into the office. Harrowman, the liaison officer, was at his desk doing nothing that looked particularly urgent, while a Guide Kas didn’t know stood beside him at attention. When they entered, Harrowman gestured to the Guide. 

“Sentinel,” the Guide said, holding out his hand. Angel glanced up at Kas, clearly confused. He had figured out by now that the Army didn’t shake hands, but he clearly had no idea what was up. Kas nodded slightly, and Angel slowly put out his hand.

What Kas wanted to do was knock the other Guide out of the way before he could start pawing at _his_ Sentinel, which was strange in itself. Sentinels were known for being possessive about Guides, especially but not only when there was a new Bond, but never the other way around. Kas, who now had an inkling what was going on, supposed that was why they had brought a Guide in for this, instead of a Sentinel.

When the other Guide clasped Angel’s hand, Kas felt a strange sort of pressure in the place where their Bond was. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it was decidedly unpleasant, like when he was a kid and his sister would hold her hands millimeters from his skin and say, “I’m not touching you!” 

Finally, the strange Guide dropped Angel’s hand. “Congratulations, Sentinel.” Turning to Harrowman, he said, “They’re Bonded, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

Kas wondered if it was standard procedure for the Army to verify a new Bond, or if they were suspected of faking it. 

“Sentinel Temas.” Harrowman shook his head.

“Sir?” Angel asked nervously.

“You may think you’ve been very clever, Sentinel, but I assure you I am not at all amused. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Sir?”

“Stop saying _sir_ , you little moron. Who the hell told you that you could Bond with this, this, Guide, before you’ve even finished Basic training?”

“It was my understanding that I didn’t need permission,” Angel said.

“You shouldn’t even know _how_ to Bond until after Sentinel School. And by then you’d know better! After Sentinel School, after your advanced training—then, if you really have to, you can Bond. Not that you should be able to. Nobody else in the Army gets to pick who their subordinates are. But of course, Sentinels are special.”

He stared at Angel for a long time; Angel, wisely, didn’t say anything.

“How did you find out how to do this?” he demanded. “Who told you?”

Angel finally said, “My Guide told me.”

“Of course he did. Do you do everything your Guide tells you? Christ, we should have let the Air Force have you. I’ve never met a more useless Sentinel. And don’t think G-TAC won’t be hearing about your Guide. I’m sure he thinks he’s pretty god damn clever too, snaring himself a Sentinel he can dominate, but they’ll straighten him out, I assure you.”

Angel clutched at Kas’s hand. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll learn. They have ways of dealing with insubordinate Guides.”

“We’re Bonded. They can’t separate us.”

“That’s what your Guide told you, is it?” With a snide smile, he handed Angel a clipboard with several forms attached. “Fill these out. You can use the empty office down the hall. 16-B.”

Once they were out in the hallway again, Angel dropped the clipboard to clutch at Kas with both hands. “What was he talking about? He can’t actually—they can’t--”

“He was lying,” Kas said, stroking Angel’s back soothingly. “Trying to rattle you.” Kas himself was pretty rattled. He had heard things, about G-TAC, and what they did to Guides who didn’t cooperate. Kas hadn’t had much trouble with them before—in training, he’d done what he was told and kept his mouth shut, and he’d been fine. The occasional G-TAC liaison officer gave him grief over his inconvenient habit of contributing to mission objectives instead of focusing exclusively on his Sentinel, but he knew how to handle that—just agree with everything they said, and be on his best behavior while they were around. It also didn’t hurt to discretely let his COs know that while they thought that sort of thing was an asset, liaison officers were happier not knowing about it. “They’ll probably be keeping a pretty close eye on us, but they can’t separate us.” 

“Are you sure?”

“Completely sure.” 

Angel nodded. “Okay. Okay.” 

Kas retrieved the clipboard and helped Angel fill out the forms to register their Bond. There were a lot of them, and they all had to be filled out in triplicate. 

“It’s Charles,” Kas said as Angel started filling out the section of the form with Kas’s vital data. “Charles Nathaniel Dillinger.” He hesitated before adding, “the third.” 

“I thought your name was Kas.”

“Yeah, well, the grandfather they named me after went by Chas, and somehow that turned into Kas. I don’t know.” 

“At least they only named you after one ancestor,” Angel said glumly, filling that in. “I have four middle names. Five if you count my mother’s surname. I had to pick one for my dog tags, since it wouldn’t all fit. I went with Gustavo, which tells you something about the other four. What do I put for your new name? Charles Nathaniel Dillinger Temas the Third? That’s not going to fit.”

“No, we definitely have to trim it down some. The ‘the third’ part definitely goes, since it won’t be the exact same name that my grandfather and his father had. Charles Nathaniel Temas or Charles Dillinger Temas.”

“Which one?”

“You get to pick, actually,” Kas said. “I’ve met a couple of Guides whose Sentinels changed their whole name.”

“That’s kind of weird. Why would somebody do that?”

“One, the Guide’s first name was the same as the Sentinel’s brother’s name, and the other one just didn’t like the name her Guide came with.”

“What was it?”

“I forget. It wasn’t anything particularly weird; she just took a dislike to it for some reason. His new name was David.” That had probably been David’s first sign that his Bonding was a huge mistake, but not the last. 

Angel shook his head. “Okay. Dillinger Temas would be more like how we do married names in Cuba.”

“That’s fine.” He had never particularly liked “Nathaniel” as a middle name. “Actually, you could just put Kas for my first name.” That way he wouldn’t have to explain that “Kas” was somehow short for “Charles” anymore.

Frowning, Angel said, “Are you sure? Kas Dillinger Temas?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I like it.”

A few days later, though, when Kas’s new dog tags were issued—to Angel, not Kas—suddenly it all seemed terribly real. The new name was all right—he liked the new name. But his serial number was now Angel’s, with a G on the end, and his religious persuasion was now coded as C for Catholic, instead of P for Protestant. _And thy God shall be my God_. Christ, it was like as far as the Army was concerned, he didn’t even exist anymore, except as a sort of accessory to his Sentinel. 

Well, he didn’t. He had known that was the arrangement when he agreed to the Bond. It wasn’t like it was a surprise. Ranger Sergeant Dillinger was dead; long live Guide Temas. 

“What’s wrong?” Angel asked, leaning over his arm to peer at the new tags. “They got it right, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, they did.” He took the old tags off the chain and replaced them with the new ones. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” 

Later, when they were back in the barracks, he wrapped the old tags in the bandana they had used for the Bonding, and stuffed them both down into the bottom of his duffle. 

The next Sunday, Angel graduated with his platoon. There were more speeches than usual and a lot of reporters hanging around, trying to ask Squad Four how it felt to be the first women to graduate from co-ed basic training. Kas just hoped that none of the mistakes Angel made during the drill exercises showed up on the news. Fortunately, the camera crews seemed to be shooting around him—as dashing as he looked in his dress uniform, he did spoil the visual effect of a line of feminine legs marching in unison. 

Several of the women’s parents had come to see their daughters graduate, and after the ceremonies they took the whole squad to a steakhouse. Kas suspected that the other squads were celebrating in a more raucous fashion, but Angel seemed to have fun. He had little trouble with the noise or cigarette smoke in the crowded restaurant, and devoured a rack of spicy ribs and looked for more. Most Sentinels preferred bland food—Kas ordered a plain steak and potato, expecting that he’d have to trade plates with Angel—but Angel pronounced it the first decent meal he’d had in six months. 

The next morning, after a final breakfast in the chow hall, where Angel ate no more than usual, they returned to the barracks to collect their gear. They’d soon be boarding a plane to Miami, where Kas would meet his Sentinel’s family for the first time. Meanwhile, squad four were gathered in the lounge, crying, hugging, and promising to write. 

While Angel was busy with that, Kas detoured into Sergeant Macon’s office. “Dillinger—Temas, whatever. Come on in.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Well, you did it.”

“He did. We did.” Kas shook his hand.

“Nice work. I didn’t think it could be done, but—well, he’s almost a soldier, anyway.”

“Close enough. Thanks for all your help.”

“Huh. If they hadn’t sent you, I’d probably be getting ready to start him over in my next platoon. Thanks for taking him off my hands.”

They exchanged salutes, and Kas went off to collect his Sentinel.

**Author's Note:**

> Historical Note: The real-life US Army briefly experimented with Gender Integrated Basic Training in 1980, when this story is set. Apart from that, I make no promises about the accuracy with which boot camp is portrayed--I read up on it, but I've never actually been. To the best of my knowledge, there is no real-world parallel for the amount of special treatment Angel gets as a result of being a Sentinel; in real life he would have just been thrown out.


End file.
